
Gopyiight}!". 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSm 



^P Charles W, CUat 



THE ROAD TOWARD PEACE. 
UNIVERSITY ADMINISTRATION. 
CHARLES ELIOT, LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT, 
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 

BOSTON AND NEW YORK 



THE EOAD TOWAKD PEACE 



THE ROAD TOWAED 
PEACE 

A CONTRIBUTION TO THE STUDY OF 

THE CAUSES OF THE EUROPEAN WAR 

AND OF THE MEANS OF PREVENTING 

WAR IN THE FUTURE 

BY 

CHARLES W. ELIOT 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 

1915 






COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY CHARLES W. KLIOT 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 

Published April jqis 



APR 19 1915 

©CI,.A398422 



PREFACE 

For more than eight years past my mind has 
turned from time to time to the study of the 
causes of war, and of the means of preventing 
war. The first time I discussed in public the 
means of preventing war was at a meeting of 
the Canadian Club of Ottawa, on the 23d of 
February, 1907. The speech I made there is 
the first chapter in the present volume. In May 
of the same year, I took part in the discussions 
at the Lake Mohonk Conference on Interna- 
tional Arbitration ; and two short speeches 
which I made then form the second chapter of 
this volume. At the Lake Mohonk Conference 
of 1910, I read a paper on " The Fears which 
cause Increasing Armaments," which appears 
here as the third chapter. In 1911-12, I went 
round the world as an envoy of the Trustees 
of the Carnegie Endowment for International 
Peace to " procure material for a Report to the 
Trustees, through the Division of Intercourse 
and Education, as to what activities may wisely 
and helpfully be planned in and for the Asiatic 
countries, that will advance the cause of peace 



vi PREFACE 

and international good-will." In the summer of 
1913, I presented to the Trustees a rather full 
Report of my observations and reflections, ac- 
companied by a considerable number of sup- 
porting documents. Selected pages from that 
Report constitute the fourth chapter. The next 
three chapters consist each of a letter on the 
War written to the J^ew York Times. Chapter 
VIII is an address to the Business Women's 
Club of Boston on " America's Duty in Regard 
to the European War." The ninth chapter is 
a letter to the I^ew York Times on "The 
Sources and the Outcome of the War." Be- 
tween November 24 and December 14, I ex- 
changed letters with my friend Mr. Jacob H. 
Schiff, the eminent financier, each of us writ- 
ing four letters, and neither of us having any 
thought of publishing our letters. But, after 
three weeks of correspondence, it seemed to 
both of us that the publication of the letters 
might do some good. This correspondence ap- 
pears in the tenth chapter. A fifth letter to the 
JVew York Times makes the eleventh chapter. 
I have included in the volume as the twelfth 
chapter, an address on Forefathers' Day, 1914, 
before the New England Society in the City of 
New York; because the Pilgrim ideals, spread 



PBEFACE VU 

across the American Continent, account in large 
measure for the wide difference to-day between 
the national ideals of Germany and those of 
the United States. The thirteenth chapter of 
the book contains an address given on the 15th 
of January, 1915, before the Harvard Club of 
Boston on " National Efficiency best developed 
under Free Governments," but later revised 
and enlarged. The huge war in Europe is going 
to put to a supreme test this theory concerning 
the surest sources of national efficiency. The 
last chapter consists of a letter to the I^ew York 
Times in which I endeavored to describe the 
lessons concerning international relations which 
the war had taught convincingly down to the 
9th of March, 1915. The chapters follow the 
chronological order. 

In an appendix I have placed two addresses 
I made on the 6th of March, 1902, on the oc- 
casion of the visit of Prince Henry of Prussia 
to Cambridge and Boston. 

Charles W. Eliot. 

Cambridge, Mass., 
15 March, 1915. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER I 

The Competitive Arming of the Nations — A 
Way of Escape 1 

CHAPTER n 

Is Force the Rightful Ruler? — International 
Plans must precede International Action . 10 

Force has ceased to be the main reliance in school and 
home discipline — Prescription is a diminishing ele- 
ment in college discipline — The supreme object in edu- 
cation is to acquire self-control — In government, pro- 
tective force, which keeps peace, preserves order, and 
brings help, will always be necessary — Free governments 
use little force and that a police force — Reduction of ar- 
maments is impossible until there exists an Interna- 
tional Court and a force behind the Court. 

CHAPTER ni 

The Fears which cause the Increasing Arma- 
ments 17 

The cutting-off of over-seas supplies of food and raw 
materials — Sudden invasion — The remedies, immun- 
ity for private property at sea and a Supreme Court with 
a force behind it. 

CHAPTER IV 

Present and Future Causes of War, Especi- 
ally m the Orient — Alien Government — 
Chinese Unity — Japanese Ambitions — The 
Domination of the Pacific 30 

The future causes — The fear of invasion — The 
exemption of private property at sea — The Occidental 



CONTENTS 

desire for ports, concessions, and spheres of influence in 
the East — The inexpediency of very large units of na- 
tional territory and government — The sentiment of 
nationality — The universal objection to alien govern- 
ment — The ambitions of the Japanese — The domina- 
tion of the Pacific impossible for any one nation, desir- 
able for a combination of strong naval powers — Inter- 
national peace the interest of Japan — Many of the 
causes of war in time past continue to exist — Promising 
expenditures for the promotion of peace. 



CHAPTER V 

The Geeat European War — Its Causes, Scope, 
AND Objects — What Gains for Mankind can 
come out of it 57 

The chances of getting some gains for mankind out of 
the gigantic struggle — Secret negotiations a great 
mischief — the permanent national executive independ- 
ent of popular control — the small state in Europe — 
the larger national units in Europe — The national desire 
for larger territories and for colonies — Competitive 
armaments and universal conscription are preparations 
' for war not peace — Militarism is inconsistent with 
democratic society — the Allies are fighting for freedom 
and civilization — The American Government must be 
neutral, but American sympathies and hopes cannot be. 



CHAPTER VI 

True National Greatness — are its Founda- 
tions Imperialism or Democracy, Fighting 
Power or Solemn Public Compacts.'* .... 71 

Can the ideals of fighting power and domination be 
replaced by the ideals of peaceful competition, gener- 
ous rivalry, and cooperation for mutual benefit — Can 
civilization enforce the inviolability of treaties and other 
solemn compacts between peoples? 



CONTENTS XI 

CHAPTER VII 

Some Grounds for American Sympathy with 
Modern Germany — Why American Opinion 

FAVORS THE ALLIES IN THE GrEAT WaR — ThE 

Most Favorable Issue of the War .... 81 

German commercial and industrial growth since the 
Franco-Prussian War — Achievements in Letters and 
Science in the nineteenth century — Administrative eflS- 
ciency — Why American opinion favors the Allies — 
Why thoughtful Americans see but one possible issue of 
the War — For more than a generation the fallacy that 
Might makes Right has been poisoning the springs of 
German thought — Americans hope and expect that the 
present struggle will result in neither Worid-Empire nor 
ruin for the German Nation. 

CHAPTER VIII 

America's Duty in regard to the European 
War 97 

The great disappointments the War has brought to 
all persons who hoped that the human race was making 
steady progress in civilization — The destructiveness 
of the fighting — The violation of treaties and conven- 
tions — The abandonment of the chivalrous principle 
that the strong should protect, not crush, the weak — 
The disregard of the ameliorations of warfare which in- 
ternational law was supposed to have procured — The 
development of fierce hatreds between nations — The 
acceptance by Germany of the dogma that Might makes 
Right — American neutrality official or legal — Keep 
the industries going — No hoarding — Least possible 
reduction of expenditures, except expenditures on luxu- 
ries — Neither party will stop fighting till exhaustion 
threatens — Reasons for the American belief that Eng- 
land, France, and Russia will hold out longest — The 
obligations of the American people to England and 
France — Can we think of giving no aid to England or 



Xll CONTENTS 

Prance if she come near the end of her resources — Amer- 
icans see whither the German policies and the teachings 
of the German leaders have led the German people. 



CHAPTER IX 

The Causes of the War are Autocratic In- 
stitutions, National Desires for Empire, 
Disregard for Treaties and Conventions, 
AND False Philosophies — Why Germany must 
BE Defeated 114 

German desire for World-Empire — The invincible 
army and navy — The doctrine of military necessity — 
The religion of valor — What German domination would 
mean — Germany has never feared Russia — Empire or 
downfall, victory or ruin, the real mottoes of German 
leaders — Desirable outcomes of the War — No World- 
Empire for any race or nation — No chief executives with 
power to throw their countrymen into war — No secret 
diplomacy — No conscript armies — A league or Federal 
Council to prevent war, bring about the reduction of 
armaments, and secure the liberties of each and all the 
federated states — The justifiable war — The cause of 
righteous liberty is the cause of civilization. 



CHAPTER X 

Correspondence between Charles W. Eliot and 
Jacob H. Schiff about the War, between 
November 24, and December 14, 1914 . . . 129 

No lasting peace without the abandonment of Ger- 
many's intense desire for enlargement — American pub- 
lic opinion should express itself in favor of an early 
peace — A group of American publicists might induce 
the Governments of England, France, and Germany to 
listen to reasonable terms — The War ought not to stop 
until Germany sees that its declared policies cannot pre- 



CONTIJNTS xiu 

vail — Europe should now choose between the German 
ideal of the State and the Anglo-American — The com- 
batants would not Usten now to outsiders advising im- 
mediate peace — The United States has no right to any 
position as umpire — To stop the War now would be to 
leave humanity exposed to the certain recurrence of 
ferocious war — Make peace now to stop the destruc- 
tion of life and capital — The perpetual ceasing of war 
is impracticable — Free-trade cannot be established 
throughout the world — The European nationalism of 
the past fifty years will not cease — England will not 
abandon her domination of the high seas — If England 
and her ally Japan come out victorious, the United 
States will be forced into heavy expenditures for defense 
— K the Allies are victorious, Russia will become the 
most powerful nation and England's Nemesis. 



CHAPTER XI 

The War an Unprecedented Calamity — SHAiji 
ITS Outcome be an Unprecedented Gain? . . 151 

Unprecedented scale and destructiveness of the War — 
The most horrible calamity that has befallen the race — 
Each Government denies responsibility for it — Real 
causes are, (1) autocratic governments, (2) conscript 
armies and large mihtary class, (3) bureaucracy, (4) the 
lust of empire — Germany has three times added to her 
territory in Europe by war — Has been aggressive in 
her search for colonies and in her eager desire for World- 
Empire — The Emperor as War Lord and Sovereign 
by Divine Right — The German conception of the State 
— the Beatitudes and the Religion of Valor — No such 
thing as World-Empire for any single nation — National 
militarism to be controlled by an international force 
under the direction of a European League or Council — 
The establishment of such a League or Council must 
precede reductions in national armaments — The ex- 
amples of Switzerland, Great Britain, and the United 
States — Peace proposals should be minirniiin not maxi- 
mum proposals. 



XIV CONTENTS 

CHAPTER Xn 

The Pilgrims' Ideals — A Free Church in a 
Free State in 1620 164 

Religious liberty and toleration, civil and political 
liberty, and a chief executive elected for one year — A 
progressive church in a state created and controlled by 
free men — Stock in their commercial company paid for 
either in cash or in personal risk and service — An exam- 
ple of cooperative management — Every able-bodied 
citizen bore arms — The " United Colonies of New Eng- 
land" an early example of confederation — Europe has 
never got so far as the Pilgrims in 1643 — The Pilgrims 
proved that there is no safe substitute for the institution 
of private property — Compare the teachings of modern 
Socialism — The Pilgrims practiced "Each for All and 
All for Each" — The Pilgrim women courageous, cap- 
able, and strong — More truth and light are constantly 
to be won, and it is Truth that makes men free — This 
faith can rescue Europe from the present horrors and 
sufferings. 



CHAPTER XIII 

National Efficiency best Developed under 
Free Governments 181 

The real causes of the War are states of mind, ambi- 
tions of princes and peoples, and popular emotions — 
The potent sentiment of nationality is independent of 
common language, size of territory, and form of govern- 
ment — Recent tendency toward larger national units — 
New conceptions of the State — Imperialism — The 
government of Germany the most autocratic in Europe 
— The Germans do not know what political and social 
liberty is, or understand parliamentary or party govern- 
ment — To them political liberty means public incapa- 
city and weakness — The War a conflict between free 
and autocratic institutions — The exceptional position of 
Russia — Can the freer nations develop an eflSciency 



CONTENTS XV 

equal to the German — no liberty in German education 

— The German estimate of the intellectual and social 
influence of women — The limitations of German "aca- 
demic freedom" — German efficiency depends on the 
subjection of the individual — All the freer nations be- 
lieve in liberty as an essential element in the development 
of the individual, and therefore of national efficiency — 
The improvements in industries have proceeded from the 
freer countries, and not from the countries despotically 
governed — Germany cannot claim leadership in useful 
inventions or in literatvu-e, science, philosophy, or poetry 

— The War will test this theory of national efficiency. 



CHAPTER XIV 
Lessons of the Wab to March Ninth . . . 206 

APPENDIX 

I. President Eliot's address at the special academic session 
called to confer the degree of Doctor of Laws on Prince 
Henry of Prussia, March 6, 1902 221 

II. President Eliot's address at a banquet given March 6, 
1902, by the City of Boston to Prince Henry of Prussia 225 



THE ROAD TOWARD PEACE 



CHAPTER I 

THE COMPETITIVE ARMING OF THE NATIONS 
A WAY OF ESCAPE^ 

I TOOK a very serious subject for my few 
minutes' talk to you to-day, when I wrote to 
your Secretary that I should like to speak 
about " The Way of Escape from the Compet- 
itive Arming of the Nations." Secretary Root 
alluded to what is to be my text when he spoke 
before you a few weeks ago. There is, in the 
history of the United States and Canada, a 
most extraordinary act, which, I believe, prophe- 
sies a way of escape from this monstrous and 
shameful evil, the competitive arming of the 
civilized nations against each other. Secretary 
Root alluded to it as a convention, a conven- 
tion made in 1817 by the Government of Great 
Britain and the Government of the United 
States, to limit the armaments on the Great 
Lakes for both nations. That was a very ex- 

1 An address before the Canadian Club of Ottawa on the 23d 
of February, 1907. 



2 THE ROAD TOWABD PEACE 

traordinary document in its form. It was not 
a treaty ; it was not a law ; it was, as described 
in the proclamation of James Monroe, Presi- 
dent of the United States, an " arrangement " 
— that was all. The two countries agreed that 
they would only maintain on the Great Lakes 
each one vessel of not exceeding one hundred 
tons and carrying one eighteen-pounder on 
Lake Ontario, two other vessels on the " Upper 
Lakes," as they were described, each of the 
same size and with the same gun, and one other 
on Lake Champlain. That was to be the abso- 
lute limit of the armaments of these two na- 
tions on the Great Lakes. Now that "arrange- 
ment," as President Monroe called it, was made 
under very extraordinary circumstances. It was 
the invention of John Quincy Adams. It was 
presented by him to our then Secretary of State, 
James Monroe, who, in the following year, be- 
came President. But the person who negotiated 
it on the part of the United States was only 
Deputy or Under-Secretary of State — it did 
not attain even the dignity of an "arrange- 
ment" by the Secretary of State. It was the 
simplest possible agreement for an heroic and 
monumental purpose. 
"^ What was the condition of things on the 



APPEAL TO PUBLIC OPINION BEFORE WAB 3 

Great Lakes at that time? The British Govern- 
ment then had in commission on the Lakes 
vessels mounting over three hundred guns, and 
was building at that moment two seventy-four- 
gun ships on the Lakes — actually building 
them at the time this arrangement was made. 
And what was the state of mind of the two na- 
tions, calm or excited ? They had just come out 
of a war, and a war in which fighting on the 
Lakes bore a great part. Were not these ex- 
traordinary conditions under which to make a 
simple "arrangement" which does not cover 
twenty lines of printed paper, to secure a per- 
fect peace of ninety years already without once 
transgressing this extraordinarily low limit of 
armament upon these Lakes on our borders ? I 
say that this act prophesies the way of escape 
from competitive armaments. 

If we consider the means of navigation in 
those days, the time required for voyages across 
the Lakes, and the dangers on the way, with 
only wind to propel the vessel, shall we not see 
that the Atlantic Ocean offers no greater obsta- 
cles to such an " arrangement " as this than the 
Lakes did then? We cross the Atlantic Ocean 
in six or seven days, with the greatest facility. 
We mount on what may be called platforms 



4 THE EOAD TOWABD PEACE 

heavy armaments, which are yet capable of pro- 
ceeding through the roughest ocean in com- 
parative steadiness. Our means for naval fight- 
ing on the instant are much greater, relatively 
to the Atlantic Ocean, than the means of these 
two peoples were for fighting on the Lakes in 
1817. I say, therefore, that in this act of our 
two Governments there is a prophecy, a hopeful 
prophecy for the future. 

What is the essence of this regulation ? It is 
simply a self-denying ordinance which secures 
equal force to the two Governments on the 
Lakes, and prevents any surprise of one power 
by the other. And that is just what needs to 
be done on an international scale. Moreover, 
this little armament on the Lakes on either side 
is nothing but a police force. Now, that is ex- 
actly what we want all over the world — a self- 
denying ordinance and a police force furnished 
by all the civilized nations, combined to main- 
tain a common force. 

What is the difference between the police 
function and the soldier's or the sailor's func- 
tion in war? I think the chief difference is 
that in the main the first is protective and the 
other destructive. Both imply the use of force ; 
and we are a long way from the time when 



APPEAL TO PUBLIC OPINION BEFORE WAR 6 

government will not rest on force. At the bot- 
tom, the most civilized governments need force 
as the basis of their power and the means of 
executing their will. But there may be a great 
difference between force and force. A police 
force is, in the main, a protective force. Now 
and then, to be sure, it proceeds energetically 
against a criminal, an offender, a disturber of 
the peace. But far the greater part of the func- 
tion of the police is protection. It goes quickly 
to the scene of any catastrophe ; it preserves 
order on the highways, in crowds, and in indus- 
tries ; it maintains the peace. You have in 
Canada a splendid example of the legitimate, 
the indispensable, the omnipresent police force 
in your Northwest Mounted Police. There is a 
force eminently superior to that of the soldier. 
Any one of these police officers can arrest, — 
that is a very wholesome power, and it is just 
what we want between the nations ; we want a 
force that can arrest the disturber. We want 
that bulwark for peace — a police force that 
can prevent disturbance, and deal effectively 
and finally with the disturber of the peace, 
whoever he is. He is probably a person tempo- 
rarily out of his mind. He needs protection 
from himself, and all the rest of us need to be 



6 TEE BO AD TOW ABB PEACE 

protected from him. That is the true function 
of a police force, and that is what the civilized 
world greatly needs. 

But then, you will say, police officers ordi- 
narily act under the direction of a court, if 
there be an accessible court. It is quite con- 
venient in the wilderness to have a pohce offi- 
cer who is himself a magistrate, and that is 
just what you have provided. But, as a rule, 
an effective poHce acts under the orders of a 
court. There again, we have at The Hague a 
momentous prophecy of the reorganization of 
the civilized world to preserve peace, and to 
protect the productive industries. It is but the 
shadow, the ghost, you may say, of an effective 
court as yet ; for behind every effective court 
must lie force — the police force. That is what 
the international tribunal will need and must 
have, to be an effective tribunal. Should we 
shrink from the prospect of such control, under 
the findings of an international court with force 
behind it to compel obedience? We are used 
to all that in the organization of every one of 
the civilized nations. In the structure and de- 
velopment of every nation that process, that 
habit of obedience to the mandate of a court 
enforced, marks the gathering growth of civil- 



APPEAL TO PUBLIC OPINION BEFORE WAR 7 

ization. And that is what the group of nations 
which is to make up the civilized world needs 
to create — the habit, as a group of nations, of 
submitting to the mandate of an international 
court enforced. 

Now, we people who have come into this new 
land, out of the older nations that loved liberty 
and slowly gained it, always shrink from new 
submissions. But if we look back upon our own 
past — and that is the only way to look forward 
with insight into the future — do we not learn 
by our own experiences that here lies the way 
of peace and good-will ? As I survey the numer- 
ous experiments of free government on the earth, 
the whole question of success in free government 
seems to resolve itself into the amount of good- 
will which can be developed under free govern- 
ment between the governors and the governed, 
and between the different classes of men who 
live together under one form of government. 
That is the test of success in free government — 
the total amount of good-will which it develops. 
Now, our Governments, the United States on 
one hand and Canada on the other, have been 
more successful than any other free governments 
in the world, so far as I know, in developing just 
that good-will among men. 



8 THE BOAD TOWARD PEACE 

We have great new strifes in both our coun- 
tries, new strifes which have grown out of the 
astounding social and industrial changes of the 
last forty years. I see at this table one whom I 
am proud to claim as a graduate of Harvard 
University, whose business seems to be, as far 
as I understand it, to get in between the striv- 
ers in industrial contests. Now, these strifes 
have something to teach concerning international 
strifes. We have had such at their worst in the 
United States within the last fifteen years, and 
you have had them here in very serious form. 
We are both likely to have them in the future ; 
because not all men on either side of these con- 
troversies are men of good-will — and so we are 
going to encounter this new form of struggle 
and contention. What is the way out of that? 
I believe that your House of Commons has been 
taking some action to-day which looks toward 
providing the most hopeful way out of these 
strifes, namely, through publicity — nothing 
but publicity. In the United States we are in 
the habit of complaining very much and very 
often about the publicity which our newspapers 
give to every fair and every foul happening in 
the United States. But, gentlemen, in that pub- 
licity lies the great hope of the world. It is the 



APPEAL TO PUBLIC OPINION BEFORE WAB 9 

hope of peace ; it is tlie guaranty of peace ; it 
is the way we are to find not only industrial 
peace, but peace between the civilized nations 
of the world. We are going to see the limita- 
tion of armaments, the international court, the 
international police force, and the compelled ap- 
peal to public opinion before war. That, as I 
understand it, is just what you are going to do 
with regard to industrial strifes — to compel ap- 
peal to public opinion before war. And there I 
find the promise of a better day in regard to 
competitive arming. What a hideous waste that 
arming is ! Some eminent authorities maintain 
that the way to preserve peace is to make your- 
self formidable for war. Gentlemen, that is not 
the way of the United States and Canada since 
the year 1817. And is there a more completely 
successful example to be found anywhere of the 
way to escape competitive arming? 



CHAPTER II 

IS FORCE THE RIGHTFUL RULER ? INTERNA 

TIONAL PLANS 
TIONAL ACTION 



TIONAL PLANS MUST PRECEDE INTERNA- 
1 



We have heard a great variety of suggestions 
this morning concerning the furtherance of this 
cause in institutions of education. Some of 
them have been practical suggestions as to what 
may be taught and done in schools and colleges. 
But I think most of them have been really sug- 
gestions that this holy cause is best to be fur- 
thered in educational institutions by a steady 
improvement in what Professor Willoughby 
called their moral climate. That change of moral 
climate is sure to bring about a state of public 
opinion which will mitigate the violence of na- 
tions. Now, there are a good many hopeful signs 
as to a change of moral climate in our institu- 
tions of education. I have personally seen sev- 
eral most encouraging changes in this respect. 
For instance, when I was a boy in the best public 
school of the city of Boston and the oldest 

^ A speech to the Lake Mohonk Conference on Interna- 
tional Arbitration in May, 1907. 



IS FORCE THE RIGHTFUL RULER? 11 

school in Massachusetts, the control used was 
physical force, the application of torture — that 
is the long and short of it ; the control was force. 
Now that has disappeared from the American 
school system, and with it has gone the teach- 
ing that force is the rightful ruler. That change 
runs through the American family as well as the 
American school. There has been a wonderful 
improvement in home discipline in that respect, 
and that improvement goes our way, ladies and 
gentlemen. It goes toward the abandonment in 
all human affairs of the exercise of force as final 
control. 

There is another climatic change which has 
been wrought in schools and colleges quite 
within the period of my observation. There used 
to be all through our school system and our col- 
lege system a large element of prescription, — 
« Thou shalt " and " Thou shalt not ! " There 
was a deplorably small element of cultivation 
of freedom of the will, of self-control in the 
individual. 

The implicit obedience inculcation is another 
way of expressing subjection to force in gov- 
ernment. It is essentially military in quality; 
and there again we have a change in all our 
educational institutions which goes the way of 



12 THE BOAD TOWARD PEACE 

this Conference. We cultivate now in the young, 

— that is, the wise teacher cultivates in the 
young, from the beginning and all through 
school life, the power of self-direction, self- 
control; and, after all, to acquire self-control 
is the supreme object in education. Here again 
is a broad change in education which goes the 
way of this Conference toward international 
self-control. 

But are we to expect that the element of 
force is now going out of government ? By no 
means. It must remain, as Commissioner Draper 
said, the ultimate appeal. But what kind of 
force is going to continue in the world ? Not 
the force of army and navy, but the force we 
call police power, a force nineteen twentieths of 
the applications of which are protective. Force 
as protection is an entirely different thing from 
force as aggression. What the world is going 
to preserve as abiding force is the force we call 
police force, which keeps peace, preserves order, 
and brings help. 

Universities and colleges illustrate, I believe, 

— at least in our country, — the coming form 
of government all over the world. The coming 
form — not to-morrow, not in the next decade, 
but we may fairly hope in the next century. 



IS FOBCE TEE BIGHTFUL BULEB? 13 

What is the characterization of college and 
university government ? No force whatever, no 
penalty except exile — and that is enough — 
in all these college and university administra- 
tions of our country. In that condition they 
teach freedom, they teach self-government ; and 
there is another thing they teach — good-will. 
Good-will among men results from all teaching 
which can be called world-wide, all teaching of 
the nature of different peoples, of their laws 
and customs, and of their religions. The great- 
est development in teaching that I know of 
during the last ten years in our institutions is 
the development of what is called comparative 
teaching : — comparative anatomy, comparative 
physiology, comparative psychology, and com- 
parative pathology. This comparative teaching 
goes right into moral questions as well as physi- 
cal questions. Much of the teaching of law has 
become comparative and much of the teaching 
of religion. 

In all these ways the colleges and universi- 
ties are widening out human sympathies, and 
bringing in a new epoch of good-will. The 
universities, it was said this morning, live to 
seek and to teach truth. Very true. Now, my 
present teachers in Biblical criticism have 



14 THE BOAD TOWARD PEACE 

taught me that the angels' song over the plains 
of Bethlehem is not rightly translated in the 
common version. It is not "Peace on earth, 
good-will to men " ; the real meaning is, " Peace 
on earth to men of good-will." That is what 
the universities are helping to bring about, the 
increase of good-will ; and then force will only 
be appUed to men who lack good-will. There 
will always be some such men, therefore there 
will always be some force needed, so far as we 
can see ; but the policies of the American uni- 
versities as forms of government indicate that 
before very long the free governments of the 
world will find it necessary to use but little force 
and that a police force. 

UNTIMELY PEACE PROPOSALS* 

I suppose we are all agreed that both these 
objects are very desirable. They are elements 
in the great reform to which this Conference 
is committed ; — no doubt about that. But the 
platform this year is drawn in a somewhat new 
manner. It urges that the Second Conference 

1 Remarks at the same Conference on proposals tltat tbe 
Conference recommend action at the Second Conference of 
The Hague on the Neutralization of Ocean Trade Routes, 
and on the Immediate Reduction of Armaments. 



UNTIMELY PEACE PROPOSALS 15 

of The Hague take certain action. Is there a 
person in this room who can suppose for a mo- 
ment that the Second Conference of The Hague 
can take action on either of these propositions ? 
Our platform, as reported, urges positive, af- 
firmative action at the Second Conference of 
The Hague on five important points. We must 
all agree that the neutralization of routes of 
commerce is impossible until there is a real 
court at The Hague, and a force to carry out its 
orders. A force must see to the execution of the 
neutralization of routes. We have examples of 
neutralization in the world already — admirable 
examples — Switzerland and the Suez Canal; 
— and how are those neutralizations enforced? 
When Swiss territory is to be held neutral, 
Switzerland puts an army of a hundred thou- 
sand men into the field ; when the Suez Canal 
is to be held neutral, the whole navy of Great 
Britain enforces the order. Shall we forward 
the reforms we have in mind by urging action 
on either of these two proposals, when we all 
know that it is impossible for The Hague to 
take action? We might reasonably say, per- 
haps, that we ask The Hague to begin the study 
of a plan for the reduction of armaments. That 
looks possible; that looks feasible. Nothing 



16 THE BOAD TOWABD PEACE 

else is feasible. Is there a person in this room 
who would advise Germany to consent to an 
arbitration on the reduction of armaments? 
Germany, as Mr. Smiley has said, is surrounded 
by alien armies which can be rushed on to her 
territory at a week's notice. Can the United 
States, off here across the ocean, in a position 
of singular security, propose even that Germany 
shall consent to a discussion of the reduction 
of armaments until there is an international 
court and a force behind the court ? It seems 
to me, from all my experience in carrying on 
reforms, that the first rule for a reformer is 
never to urge action toward a reform till he has 
prepared an adequate plan of action. We have 
no plan of action with regard to the reduction 
of armaments or the neutralization of ocean 
trade routes. Nobody has such a plan. We 
ought to have an international plan before we 
urge international action. 



CHAPTER m 

THE FEARS WHICH CAUSE THE INCREASING 
ARMAMENTS^ 

All peace promoters have been cheered by 
the progress made since Russia called the first 
Hague Conference toward the substitution of 
arbitration for war, and this meeting in partic- 
ular has been greatly encouraged and stimu- 
lated to-day. It is plain, however, that much 
remains to be done before a permanent inter- 
national supreme court is established with some 
adequate force behind it, whether control of 
credit, or armed police, or effective world-opin- 
ion, and that the race for armaments is hotter 
than ever. 

There must, then, be some very strong rea- 
sons for the slow progress made toward an ef- 
fective system of international arbitration, and 
for the continuance of the extraordinarily waste- 
ful competition in providing armaments; for 
all the competing nations feel keenly the well- 
nigh intolerable burden of taxation which mod- 

1 A paper read at the Lake Mohonk Conference of May, 
1910. 



18 TEE ROAD TOWABD PEACE 

ern preparations for war on the instant, offen- 
sive or defensive, impose. 

I find these reasons in two chronic apprehen- 
sions felt by all the civilized nations ahke, — 
although the two are not equally felt by the 
different peoples, because of geographical and 
commercial diversities. The first of these chronic 
apprehensions is the fear lest the nation's exte- 
rior supplies of food or of the raw materials of 
its industries should be cut off. The second is 
the fear lest an immense hostile army should be 
thrown into the national territory with only a 
few days', or even a few hours', warning. 

Either of these chronic apprehensions may 
be suddenly exalted to panic by occurrences of 
a really trivial nature. The speech of a minister 
before a legislature, a note from a ruler, or even 
a short series of articles in an influential news- 
paper may raise either of these chronic appre- 
hensions to the dimensions of a panic. These 
fears are not fairly to be described as dreams, 
or illusions, or fantastic nightmares. They are 
not created, though they may be aggravated, 
by unscrupulous manufacturers, tradesmen, or 
newspapers. They are founded on historical 
facts, borne clearly in mind by the present gen- 
erations, and on generally accepted axioms con- 



FEABS CAUSE COMPETITIVE ARMING 19 

cerning national well-being, as likely to be di- 
minished by being conquered, or even invaded, 
and increased by any successful conquering. 

These axioms may be as absurd as the duel- 
ling code now seems to most Anglo-Saxons, but 
like that code of so-called honor they are gen- 
erally accepted in continental Europe and among 
large portions of the population of North and 
South America, and Great Britain. It is a solid 
fact that an overwhelming majority of the Eng- 
lish people feel it to be for them a matter of 
life and death that they keep ready for instant 
action fleets capable of preventing invasion and 
the cutting-off of the food suppHes and the raw 
materials which come to them over seas ; and 
so long as they seriously dread catastrophes of 
that nature they will keep on building prepon- 
derant fleets. They must have security against 
such ruinous calamities. 

England and Japan are the two nations which 
may reasonably feel most intensely the appre- 
hension about their food and raw materials; 
but nations whose territories are not insular 
may also feel it to a high degree. Thus, Italy 
must import by sea both food and coal, France 
would suffer much if deprived of sea-borne cot- 
ton, and Germany needs to import by sea not 



20 THE ROAD TOWARD PEACE 

only mucli food, but a great variety of materi- 
als for her expanding industries. The territory 
of the United States is so vast, and extends 
through so many climates, that it is difficult for 
us to realize how formidable to any nation which 
cannot raise on its own soil all its food and 
most of the important materials of the indus- 
tries by which it lives, is the dread of the cut- 
ting-off of a large portion of its food or its raw 
materials, or both. During far the greater part 
of the year England is not supposed to have in 
stock at any one time more than six weeks' sup- 
ply of food for her population. 

In view of such a fact we Americans ought 
to be able to realize that this dread of the cut- 
ting-off of essential supplies must be calmed and 
disposed of before the incessant preparations 
for war now going on can possibly be checked 
or stopped. A very important question, there- 
fore, to be considered by those who wish to take 
effective measures to promote peace is this: 
What generally accepted rule of international 
action would give relief from this intolerable 
apprehension, and what new police forces would 
be necessary to secure the observance of that 
rule? 

Confining our thoughts in the first place to 



FEARS CAUSE COMPETITIVE ARMING 21 

operations on the oceans, we easily see that the 
adoption by a decided majority of the great 
maritime powers of the principle of the immu- 
nity of private property at sea would in itself 
go far to relieve from this great apprehension 
the nations that suffer most from it. If during 
a naval war all merchant vessels were free to 
come and go on the open seas without danger 
of capture or of any interference, a nation at 
war would have little reason to dread the inter- 
ruption of its supply of either food or raw ma- 
terial. To affect dangerously its supplies, its 
adversary would have to establish a real block- 
ade of its ports, which is a difficult and costly 
operation in these days of high-speed vessels 
independent of wind. It may be observed in 
passing that changes in the definitions of block- 
ade and contraband decidedly advantageous to 
neutrals were made by the Naval Conference in 
which Germany, the United States, Austria-] 
Hungary, Spain, France, Great Britain, Italy, 
Japan, Russia, and the Netherlands participated 
at London in 1908-09.1 This Conference did 

1 The Declaration issued by the Conference by Article 1, 
Chapter 1, limits blockade to ports and coasts belonging to or 
occupied by the enemy, which is a restrictive definition of high 
value- 
In Article 28, Chapter 2 the following articles are declared 



22 THE BO AD TOW ABB PEACE 

work of high value, although only ten selected 
nations joined in it. The precedent may prove 
a very useful one. 

The adoption on paper of this doctrine of the 
immunity of private property on the sea would 
not suffice, however, to relieve the intense anx- 
iety of the civilized peoples about their essen- 
tial supplies. They must see in readiness a po- 
lice force capable of securing the execution of 
such an agreement in all parts of the globe. 

Can we imagine the creation of such a force? 
It must, of course, be an overwhelming inter- 
national force, which no single nation would 
have a fair chance of successfully resisting, and 
it must be available in all the oceans. These 
conditions would be fulfilled if the group of 
nations which took part in the Naval Confer- 
ence at London, or even a smaller group of na- 

not to be contraband of war : Raw cotton, wool, silk, jute, flax, 
hemp, and the other raw materials of the textile industries, 
rubber, resins, gums and lacs, hops, raw hides, natural and ar- 
tificial manures, ores, clays, lime, stone, bricks, slates and tiles, 
porcelains and glassware, paper, soaps, colors, varnishes, chem- 
icals like soda, ammonia, and sulphate of copper, machines 
used in agriculture, mining, the textile industries and printing, 
precious stones, clocks and watches. It is obvious that this list, 
which is not the complete enumeration of Article 28, covers 
articles of great value to every manufacturing nation, and that 
this clear declaration that they are not contraband marks a 
decided advance in the law of maritime war. 



FEARS CAUSE COMPETITIVE ARMING 23 

tlons having extensive seacoasts like England, 
France, Italy, the United States, Brazil, Chile, 
and Japan, would agree to the immunity of 
private property at sea, and to the use of their 
combined fleets, or any adequate portion thereof, 
to enforce that immunity in every part of the 
world. 

The combinations mentioned would possess 
available ports in all the great divisions of the 
ocean. Several of the nations named have al- 
ready expressed willingness to accept the doc- 
trine of immunity for private property at sea. 
The United States has advocated it for many 
years. Other nations would probably wish to 
join such a league ; but their adhesion would 
not be indispensable, though desirable. Coin- 
cident with this agreement there would have 
to be another, in order to check competition in 
naval armaments. 

The nations entering such a league would 
have to make an agreement — subject to peri- 
odical revision — not to increase their fleets be- 
yond their present limits, and to build new 
vessels, class by class, only in substitution for 
vessels past service. Limitation on the size as 
well as the number of vessels of each class 
would also be needed, and each nation would 



24 THE ROAD TOWABD PEACE 

have to be kept informed of the naval con- 
structions undertaken by every other member 
of the league. Such agreements as these and 
such publicity seem not only possible but well 
worth while, if through such action that formi- 
dable dread of the cutting-off of food supplies 
and raw materials can be done away with. It 
is a hopeful fact that experienced public men 
in various countries are beginning to mention 
such novel agreements as not inconceivable. 

The immunity of private property on the 
seas does not seem so remote as it once did, 
partly because the recent comparative immu- 
nity of private property on land during active 
warfare has not impaired the decisiveness of 
successful campaigns, and partly because the 
destruction of its mercantile marine has not 
proved to be in recent times, if indeed in any 
times, an effective mode of bringing a vigor- 
ous enemy to terms. During the Civil War of 
1861-65 the United States lost nearly all its 
sea-going merchant vessels, and has never re- 
covered its former position in the carrying 
trade of the world ; but this fact has had no 
appreciable effect on the prosperity of the coun- 
try. Nowadays any nation can easily get all its 
exports and imports carried in foreign bottoms 



FEARS CAUSE COMPETITIVE ARMING 25 

at low competitive prices. Moreover, looting on 
land and privateering at sea are no longer con- 
sidered respectable. 

An agreement of this nature with regard to 
naval forces and their international use might 
have a large incidental value. It might show 
the way to organize an international naval po- 
lice force, subject to the orders of a permanent 
arbitral court of justice at The Hague. Other 
kinds of force can be imagined to secure the 
execution of the decrees of the court, as, for 
instance, the refusal of credit to a disobedient 
government ; but all experience seems to testify 
that some adequate force must lie behind an 
international supreme court, as it always has 
behind every other court. Otherwise it may be 
feared that the court will not command in prac- 
tice the confidence of civilized mankind. 

The other chronic apprehension which pre- 
vents the progress of arbitration methods and 
the reduction of armaments is the apprehension 
of sudden and overwhelming invasion of na- 
tional territory by hostile land forces. This in- 
cessant apprehension is extremely vivid, and is 
liable to explosive increment ; and yet in this 
matter the civilized world has certainly made 
no inconsiderable progress. To be sure, modern 



26 THE ROAD TOWARD PEACE 

means of transportation by land and water have 
quickened the apprehension, and spread it over 
wider areas ; but, on the other hand, the press, 
frequent mails, and telegraphs and telephones 
have developed effective means of dispelling 
ignorance, correcting misunderstandings, and 
giving warning of storms of passion. Certain 
distinct gains in respect to danger of invasion 
are plainly to be seen. 

First, no part of the civilized world is now 
subject to sudden invasion by hordes of bar- 
barians, armed as well, or nearly as well, as 
the people whose territory they invade. In all 
conflicts with barbarians civilization has now 
an immense advantage in respect to equipment 
for fighting. Secondly, it seems probable that 
dynastic wars will never occur again in the civ- 
ilized world. Thirdly, certain small European 
states have maintained themselves successfully 
as to their territory for nearly one hundred 
years in the presence of much more powerful 
neighbors, and if the judgment of impartial 
money-lenders is to be accepted, the stable per 
capita wealth of the small states is greater and 
safer than that of the larger states. In a few 
instances, to be sure, the generation now pass- 
ing off the stage has witnessed the forcible tak- 



FEABS CAUSE COMPETITIVE ABMING 27 

ing of parts of the territory of a small state by 
a larger one, and the surrender to the victors 
of portions of conquered territory. Fourthly, 
the great costliness of modern warfare in both 
blood and treasure tends to prevent the out- 
break of actual war. Indeed, the costliness of 
mere preparation for war has increased by leaps 
and bounds during the past twenty years; and 
recently aviation has started expenditure of a 
new sort. The masses of the people begin to 
realize that they pay the costs of war; and they 
are not so dumb and helpless as they used to 
be. Hence, perhaps, the encouraging fact that 
huge armies, ready for instant action, have faced 
each other in Europe for forty years without 
once coming into collision. Fifthly, republican 
Switzerland has shown how the entire male 
population capable of bearing arms may be 
trained, and held in readiness for defensive 
warfare, without abridging seriously the indus- 
trial activities of the people, and without main- 
taining any standing army which could be used 
for offensive purposes outside the national ter- 
ritory. 

These are all good omens for peace ; but 
they afford no effectual security to any Euro- 
pean people whose territory has not been de- 



28 THE BO AD TOWABD PEACE 

clared neutral against the sudden invasion of 
their territory by a formidable alien force ca- 
pable of inflicting immense losses and of ex- 
torting a vast ransom. The Swiss experience, 
however, is more than an omen, for it shows 
one way of changing Europe from a group of 
fully armed camps, always ready for hostilities 
abroad, into a group of peace-expecting states, 
each maintaining a strong protective force, but 
no aggressive force. Civilized society is still 
founded on force, but that force should be a 
protective force. In practice it would be easier 
for a large state than for a small one to adopt 
this excellent Swiss method. Moreover, the ter- 
ritories of large states might be " neutralized " 
by agreement as well as the territories of small 
states. 

On the whole, the only way in which pro- 
moters of peace can at this moment make head 
against the apprehension of invasion is to urge 
the making of arbitration treaties which con- 
tain no exceptions, and the establishment of a 
permanent court of arbitral justice. The reduc- 
tion of armaments on land must await the es- 
tablishment of such a supreme court, unless, 
indeed, neighboring nations by twos or threes 
can make local agreements for reduction analo- 



FEABS CAUSE COMPETITIVE ABMING 29 

gous to the invaluable arrangement made in 
1817 between the United States and Great 
Britain concerning armaments on the Great 
Lakes. 



CHAPTER IV 

PRESENT AND FUTURE CAUSES OP WAR, ESPE- 
CIALLY IN THE ORIENT ALIEN GOVERN- 
MENT CHINESE UNITY — JAPANESE AMBI- 
TIONS — THE DOMINATION OF THE PACIFIC* 

Advocacy of these slow-acting means of 
preventing wars in the East implies that within 
the superintended areas the probable causes of 
international war have changed within fifty 
years. Dynastic and religious wars, and wars 
in support of despotic government are no 
longer probable; and racial antipathies are 
held in check by the superintending European 
powers in all the countries to which that super- 
intendence extends. Thus, the Pax Britannica 
has practically put an end to the racial and re- 
ligious warfare which from time to time deso- 
lated the Asiatic countries over which British 
influence now extends. Small outbreaks of 
racial antipathy or religious fanaticism occur 
locally ; but these are insignificant exceptions 

^ Extracts from a report made by Charles W. Eliot to the 
Trustees of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace 
in 1913. 



PBESENT AND FUTURE CAUSES OF WAR 81 

to the prevailing tranquillity. The fighting 
Great Britain has done to establish and main- 
tain this quieting influence has been fighting 
on a small scale compared with that which went 
on among European nations during the nine- 
teenth century, or among Oriental peoples in 
many earlier centuries, and the Pax Britannica 
has therefore been a great contribution to the 
peace of the world. 

It is not only in the East that the probable 
causes of international war have lately changed. 
All over the world, it is reasonable to suppose 
that wars for dynastic motives will occur no 
more, and that religious motives for warfare 
will hereafter be incidental or secondary in- 
stead of primary. It is also reasonable to be- 
lieve that wars in support of absolute monarchs 
and despotic government will henceforth be 
unknown, so general is the world-wide move- 
ment toward constitutional government and 
free institutions — a movement from fifty to 
three hundred and fifty years old among the 
different nations of the West, but compara- 
tively recent in the East. 

What, then, will be the probable causes of 
international war in the future ? 

The causes of war in the future are likely to 



32 THE BOAD TOWARD PEACE 

be national distrusts, dislikes, and apprehen- 
sions, which have been nursed in ignorance, 
and fed on rumors, suspicions, and conjectures 
propagated by unscrupulous newsmongers, un- 
til suddenly developed by some untoward event 
into active hatred, or widespread alarm which 
easily passes into panic. While the Eastern peo- 
ples — Far and Near — will have some causes 
of their own for war, because in some instances 
neither their geographical limits nor their gov- 
ernmental institutions are as yet settled, among 
the Western peoples the most probable future 
causes of war, in addition to national antipa- 
thies, will be clashing commercial or industrial 
interests, contests for new markets and fresh 
opportunities for profitable investment of capi- 
tal, and possibly, extensive migrations of la- 
borers. All modern governments, in which life, 
liberty, and property are secured by public 
law, desire to extend the commerce and trade 
of their people, to develop their home industries 
by procuring markets for their products in 
foreign lands, to obtain in comparatively un- 
occupied or undeveloped parts of the earth 
opportunities for the profitable employment of 
their accumulated capital, and to gain room 
for a possible surplus of population in the fu- 



PBESENT AND FUTUBE CAUSES OF WAR 33 

ture. Eastern and Western peoples alike feel 
the desire for a large, strong governmental 
unit, too formidable to be attacked from with- 
out, too cohesive to be disintegrated from 
•within. Both East and West exhibit the mod- 
ern irrepressible objection to alien rule, espe- 
cially when such rule, like that of the Manchus 
or the Turks, produces poverty and desolation, 
denies liberty, and prevents progress. 

Several Western nations, which have the sav- 
ing, or accumulating, habit, are eager to make 
loans to remote and comparatively poor na- 
tions which are in great need of money to pay 
for costly public works of transportation, con- 
servancy, public health, and public security. 
In making such loans the bankers of each 
Western nation expect the support and protec- 
tion of their own government. As security for 
such loans the borrowing government, national, 
provincial, or municipal, pledges some of its 
resources; and if the expected interest or divi- 
dend is not paid, the lender forecloses. Hence 
serious international complications. In this 
lending business the Western powers come 
into competition with each other, and stimu- 
lated by mutual jealousies, engage in aggres- 
sive operations against the Oriental peoples, 



34 TEE BOAD TOWARD PEACE 

who have been as a rule helpless in their hands, 
until Japan adopted and improved on the West- 
ern military organization and methods of fight- 
ing, and succeeded for a short time in borrow- 
ing the money needed to pay the heavy costs 
of modern warfare. 

The penetration of Oriental territories by 
traders and missionaries has given occasion for 
many attacks by Western powers on Oriental 
governments and peoples, on the theory that 
the citizen or subject of a Western govern- 
ment is to be protected by his own govern- 
ment, wherever he may wander or settle in 
Oriental communities. If any such adventurous 
citizen is harmed, there follows a "punitive 
expedition " with wholesale destruction of in- 
nocent property and life, and often an exten- 
sion of the "sphere of influence" of the 
punisher. This protection of missionaries, trad- 
ers, and travellers has often been the cause, or 
in many cases the excuse, for attacks by West- 
ern powers on Oriental communities, for the 
seizure of valuable ports and of territory adja- 
cent thereto, and for the enforced payment of 
exaggerated indemnities which heavily burden 
later generations. Hence long-continued inter- 
national dislikes and distrusts. 



PRESENT AND FUTURE CAUSES OF WAR 35 

A people which has for centuries been 
under despotic rule will not have accumulated 
any considerable masses of capital, because pri- 
vate property will not have been safe from 
arbitrary seizure, and cannot have been trans- 
mitted safely from generation to generation. 
Throughout the East, therefore, the capital 
which is seeking investment in mines, planta- 
tions, factories, transportation companies, and 
so forth, is Western capital, and is likely to be 
for at least another generation, or until Japan 
and China can reap the full benefit of the se- 
curity of capital under constitutional govern- 
ment. The Orient as a whole, and China in 
particular, will need for many years the con- 
tinuous investment of Western capital in great 
public works, such as roads, railroads, defenses 
against flood, drought, and pestilences, schools, 
universities, and a civil service which lives on 
salaries, and collects and expends honestly a 
stable public revenue. As soon as the Republic 
of China can provide itself with a stable public 
revenue, it will come into the markets of the 
world for an indefinite series of large loans ; 
and all the Western peoples will be eager to 
share in the lending. Japan, too, will need for 
many years large amounts of capital for the 



36 THE EOAD TOW ART) PEACE 

furtherance of its governmental and industrial 
changes. 

Through all the Oriental countries the mass 
of the people maintain a lower standard of liv- 
ing than that of any civilized Western people, 
whether European or American. This is partly 
a matter of climate and of density of popula- 
tion ; but it is also a matter of tradition and 
custom. When the standard of living is close 
to the limits essential to the maintenance of 
health and bodily vigor, natural catastrophes 
like droughts, floods, earthquakes, and pesti- 
lences cause recurrent periods of immense hu- 
man misery, from which recovery is slow. The 
misery of these masses in turn seriously de- 
presses the courage or enterprise of the suffer- 
ing nation, and commerce, trade, and manu- 
facturing industries throughout the world, 
particularly in those Oriental countries where 
modern means of transportation and communi- 
cation have not been adequately developed. 
Hence, frequent interruptions of trade, and dis- 
orders both interior and exterior ; and hence, 
also, troublesome migrations. The chronic pov- 
erty of multitudinous Oriental peoples hinders 
the desired development of Western industries 
and commerce ; because the poverty-stricken 



PRESENT AND FUTURE CAUSES OF WAR 37 

millions cannot afford to buy the Western 
goods. To prevent such widespread miseries 
and such chronic poverty would be to remove 
the cause of many of the violences which break 
out from time to time in Oriental communities, 
and provoke or promote the intrusion of the 
stronger Western powers. Successful preven- 
tion would imply sound legislation, efficient 
local administration, and the liberal expenditure 
of money. Advocacy of such measures and 
help in executing them would promote peace 
and good-will. Here is a great field for West- 
ern benevolence, skilfully applying private en- 
dowments to public uses. 

Some of the worst dissensions between East- 
ern and Western peoples have been caused in 
recent years by the dense ignorance and gross 
superstitions of Oriental populations. A good 
example of the contentions due to these causes 
is the Boxer insurrection in China, against 
which several Western powers took arms — 
when their Legations were attacked — with 
success so far as subduing the insurrection and 
procuring huge indemnities from China went, 
but with deplorable effects on the disposition 
of the Chinese people toward Japan and all the 
Western powers that sent troops to Peking, 



38 THE ROAD TOWARD PEACE 

with the single exception of the United States. 
The only real cure for ignorance and supersti- 
tion is universal education, and that cure will 
take time. 

Although the causes of war tend to become 
commercial and industrial, two other world- 
wide causes of war remain which are liable to 
take effect at any time in both the East and 
the West. The first is the fear of sudden in- 
vasion by an overwhelming force. This fear is 
as keenly felt in China and Japan as it is in 
Germany, France, and England ; and there are 
no better defenses against it in the East than 
in the West. The neutralization of territory 
which protects some of the small European na- 
tions, like Switzerland and Belgium, rests rather 
upon the mutual jealousy of the greater powers 
than on any established practice among the 
European peoples, or any trustworthy sense of 
expediency and justice. The nearest approach 
in the East to the practice of neutralizing ter- 
ritory is the respect paid by the larger European 
powers to the Eastern possessions of smaller 
powers. Thus, England and France are respect- 
ing the Oriental possessions of The Netherlands 
and of Portugal ; and all nations are now re- 
specting the outlying possessions of Japan. 



PBESENT AND FUTURE CAUSES OF WAR 39 

Whether the Eastern possessions o£ Western 
powers will in the future be transferred from 
one nation to another as a consequence of the 
issue of European conflicts — as they have been 
in the past — is a problem for the future. The 
only hope in the East, as in the West, for re- 
lief from this terrible apprehension of invasion 
lies in the progress of international law, and in 
the spreading opinion among publicists that 
there are better ways than war to settle inter- 
national questions about territory, commercial 
intercourse, and sovereignty. This is a region in 
which all three divisions of the activities of the 
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace 
are nearly concerned — Intercourse and Edu- 
cation, Economics, and International Law. 

The other apprehension which may at any 
time become the cause of war is the fear lest the 
supplies of food and raw material which come 
to a country over seas should be cut off. Such 
insular countries as Great Britain and Japan are 
peculiarly subject to this apprehension ; for either 
of them would be seriously distressed by even a 
short interruption of its supplies of food and raw 
material. Both these nations are therefore obliged 
to maintain navies more powerful than any likely 
to be brought against them. Hence the immense 



40 THE BOAD TOWARD PEACE 

butdens of competitive naval armaments. A rem- 
edy for this apprehension is, however, in sight. 
The doctrine that private property should be 
exempt from capture at sea, as it is already ex- 
empted from seizure without compensation on 
land, will, when adopted by a few nations which 
maintain strong navies, relieve the nations adopt- 
ing it from the dread lest their food supplies and 
the supply of raw materials for their manufactur- 
ing industries should be cut off, and the export 
of their manufactured goods be made impossible 
or unsafe. To secure relief from this recurrent 
apprehension which prompts such exorbitant 
expenditure on navies, it would not be neces- 
sary that all the nations of the world should 
adopt the doctrine of the exemption of private 
property at sea from capture. Five or six of the 
stronger nations, adopting it and enforcing it 
against all comers, could immediately secure re- 
lief for themselves, and for any other nations 
that chose to join them in the adoption of the 
policy. The United States has advocated this 
doctrine for many years; but an effective adop- 
tion of it has been prevented by the reluctance 
of Great Britain to abandon the practice of seiz- 
ing upon the ocean private property belonging 
to the subjects of her enemy. There are some 



PRESENT AND FUTURE CAUSES OF WAB 41 

signs that Great Britain is approaching the con- 
clusion that she has more to gain than to lose 
by the adoption of the policy of exemption. 

A common reason for the aggressions of 
Western powers in Eastern countries has been 
their desire to possess or control ports in the 
East through which Western trade with the 
teeming Oriental populations could be safely 
conducted. Great Britain, France, Germany, and 
The Netherlands all possess some ports, and in 
China the first three powers exercise a strong 
control over other ports by means of treaties 
and leases forced upon China. Russia's keen 
desire for better ports in Eastern waters than 
she now possesses has been a leading motive 
in her Eastern policy for many years. The 
statesmen of Japan felt that it was absolutely 
necessary for her to possess the ports of the 
Korean peninsula. When once a nation gets 
possession of ports which originally and prop- 
erly made part of another nation's territory, the 
possessing nation feels that it must defend them 
against all comers ; hence incessant preparations 
for war and ever-increasing armaments. The 
peace of the world would be promoted if no 
nation, Occidental or Oriental, possessed or con- 
trolled a port on another nation's territory. 



42 THE BO AD TOW ABB PEACE 

The peace of the world is also threatened by 
the constant efforts of most of the trading 
nations to enlarge their territories, or " spheres 
of influence," in remote parts of the world, 
whether sparsely or densely populated. It seems 
to make little difference whether these enlarge- 
ments are hkely to be profitable or not ; they 
will be acquired at a venture. 

In Europe and America, the creation of new 
and large units of government went on actively 
during the last half of the nineteenth cen- 
tury, and is still in progress by natural growth 
and new affiliations. Among political theorists 
doubts begin to be expressed about the expedi- 
ency of these very large units of national terri- 
tory and government. Evidence has been pro- 
duced that the smaller nations in Europe are 
more prosperous than the larger ; perhaps be- 
cause they waste less on armies, navies, and arma- 
ments. There are those who think that China 
would be better off if Thibet, Mongolia, and 
Manchuria should be absorbed respectively by 
Great Britain, Russia, and Japan, leaving the 
eighteen provinces of China proper as a com- 
pact and manageable whole. These objections to 
exaggerated size still remain in the region of 
speculation and not of practice ; and the desire 



PRESENT AND FUTURE CAUSES OF WAR 43 

of trading nations for more and always more 
territory remains a threatening source of inter- 
national contests. 

Kecent events, however, in both the Near and 
the Far East indicate clearly that the govern- 
ment of large populations by an alien race is 
getting increasingly difficult, and may in time 
become impossible. The unrest in India, the 
abdication of the Manchus in China, and the 
Balkan war all illustrate the fact that the govern- 
ment of large populations by an alien authority 
is likely to be more and more resented and ulti- 
mately resisted ; and that no amount of good will 
and good works by an alien government will be 
able to overcome the opposition of native races 
to such a government, just because it is alien. 
Because of the strength and vitality of this racial 
sentiment against alien government, it is likely 
that the task of governing and supervising large 
native populations from a distance by rulers, 
judges, and administrators of a very different 
race will prove to be increasingly troublesome 
and costly ; so that freedom of commerce and 
trade will come to be sought by other means. 

Against these formidable difficulties, what 
forces could the Provisional Government bring 
to bear to unify China, and construct a strong, 



44 THE BOAD TOWARD PEACE 

stable government for the eighteen federated 
provinces? These forces were only sentiments ; 
but they were just such sentiments as have 
brought into being on other continents firm and 
enduring governments. The first was the senti- 
ment of Chinese nationality; the second was the 
objection to an alien government, that of the 
Manchus, which was only a sham government ; 
and the third was the sentiment of common re- 
sistance to the aggressions which the Western 
powers had been committing for a hundred and 
fifty years on Chinese soil. 

The sentiment of nationality is vast, vague, 
and hard to define ; but the history of Europe 
and America is full of instances of its tremen- 
dous potency. It does not seem to need a com- 
mon language, or a pure race, or a smooth blend 
of somewhat different races, or the same climate, 
or identity of the sources of livelihood. It is not 
necessarily based on similar histories, common 
traditions, or even the same religion. If we may 
judge from European and American experience, 
the sentiment of nationality is based on similar 
social standards or needs, on common ideals, on 
like passions good and bad, on a love of inde- 
pendence and liberty, on a preference for a large, 
comprehensive governmental unit over a small 



THE SENTIMENT OF NATIONALITY 45 

one, and on the desire to resist common dan- 
gers, wrongs, or aggressions from without. This 
last desire is very unifying the world over. Ex- 
perience of misgovernment tends to unite the 
misgoverned, just as an earthquake, a destruc- 
tive storm, a conflagration, or a flood always 
brings out in many of the sufferers a very prac- 
tical brotherliness. Such seem to be the sources 
of the present development among the Chinese 
of a potent sentiment of nationality. 

When several races live side by side on the 
same soil and form a community, it often hap- 
pens that the ideals of one of these races domi- 
nate the development of all. This result has 
often been conspicuous in history, and is still 
exemplified in the present life of certain nations 
to which several different racial elements have 
contributed without being blended. The most 
essential element in the modern idea of nation- 
ality is identity of ideals, and of customs which 
are the offspring of ideals. 

I have already mentioned in this report the 
growth in many regions of the world of the ob- 
jection to alien government as such. It appears 
on a small scale and a large, in barbarous and 
semi-barbarous countries, and in countries which 
have long been civilized. It may be successfully 



46 THE BOAD TOWARD PEACE 

repressed for long periods, though recognized. 
It may be long concealed by multitudes who feel 
it hotly ; but it tends more and more through- 
out the world to break out at last, and win the 
day. 

The motive of resistance to foreign oppression 
works wonders toward the formation of new 
national units, as has been forcibly illustrated 
in Europe during the past year. All China has 
had such bitter experience of oppression and 
robbery on the part of Western nations, that 
she inevitably possesses a strong unifying force 
in this common sense of unjust suffering. 

All the enterprising Occidental nations are 
interested in determining accurately what the 
desires and ambitions of the Japanese people 
really are. The Japanese have proved by their 
achievements during the past forty-five years 
that as a race they possess fine physical, mental, 
and moral qualities. They possess in high de- 
gree intelligence, inventiveness, commercial and 
industrial enterprise, persistence, and the moral 
qualities which bring success in industries and 
commerce. They have learnt and put into prac- 
tice all the Occidental methods of warfare on 
sea and land, and have proved that they can 
face in battle not only the yellow races, but the 



THE DESIBES AND AMBITIONS OF JAPAN 47 

white. Are they then a dangerous or a safe ad- 
dition to the world's group of national industrial 
and commercial competitors? Is their demon- 
strated strength dangerous to the peace of the 
world and to the white race? To answer these 
questions, it is indispensable to form a clear and 
just idea of Japanese desires and ambitions. 

The Japanese are not a numerous people ; for 
they number less than one half the population 
of the United States. They are not a colonizing 
people. The Japanese Government has had 
great difficulty in inducing Japanese to settle 
in Formosa, and at the present moment it has 
similar difficulties in Korea and Manchuria. 
To be sure, the climate of Formosa is too hot 
for the Japanese ; but that of Korea and Man- 
churia resembles that of Japan. They are com- 
mercially adventurous, and will travel far and 
wide as pedlers, or in search of work and trade ; 
but they are not colonists. They are a homing 
people, like the French. They have no more 
use for the Philippines than Americans have. 
If a Japanese trader makes money in a foreign 
country, he will take his family and his money 
back to Japan as soon as he can. They do not 
intermarry with women of any foreign race, 
affording thus a strong contrast to the white 



48 THE BO AD TOW ABB PEACE 

race when in foreign parts. The inexpedient 
crossing of unlike races will not be promoted 
by them in any part of the world. 

The Japanese are not a warlike people, al- 
though within a few years they have waged two 
defensive wars, one with China and the other 
with Russia. They possess, indeed, admirable 
martial qualities, and make obedient, tough, 
and courageous soldiers in their country's ser- 
vice. Their fundamental motive in fighting, 
however, is not a natural love of it, such as is 
exhibited, or used to be exhibited, by some Occi- 
dental peoples, but a simple, profound loyalty 
to their country, and to the authoritative repre- 
sentatives of their country's power and will. In 
their intense patriotism pride, loyalty, and love 
are fused into a sentiment which completely 
dominates the private soldier, the of&cer, and 
the whole military and naval service. Still they 
are not an aggressive, conquering people ; and 
they feel no motive for acquiring new territory, 
except near-by territory which they believe to 
be necessary to the security of their island 
empire. 

The Japanese are accused, chiefly by Occi- 
dental army and navy men, of intending to 
" dominate the Pacific " ; but Japan has no such 



THE DESIBES AND AMBITIONS OF JAPAN 49 

intention. All Japanese statesmen and political 
philosophers recognize the fact that Japan is, 
and always will be, unable to "dominate the 
Pacific." No one nation in the world could pos- 
sibly control the Pacific Ocean. For that pur- 
pose a combination of at least four powers hav- 
ing strong navies would be necessary. Five or 
six powers combined, such, for example, as 
Great Britain, Germany, France, the United 
States, Japan, and Russia or Italy, could do it; 
and could at the same time dominate all the 
other oceans and seas. Such a group would 
possess ports and coaling stations on all the seas 
and oceans. It would be convenient, though not 
indispensable, if one strong South American 
government on the Atlantic Coast and one on 
the Pacific Coast joined the group. There are 
many who think a control of the oceans by 
such a combination would be desirable ; because 
it would tend to remove some of the apprehen- 
sions which cause war and preparation for war, 
and to check in their early stages offenses com- 
mitted or contemplated by one nation against 
another. 

All Japanese leaders are fully aware that it 
would be impossible for either Japan or the 
United States to send an army of a hundred 



60 THE BO AD TOWABD PEACE 

thousand men with their baggage, animals, 
stores, and munitions, across the Pacific Ocean 
in safety, although the fleet should be convoyed 
by scores of battleships and armored cruisers. 
The means of attack at night by almost invisible 
vessels on a wide-extended fleet in motion are 
quite adequate to arrest or destroy any such 
expedition, if the attacking force were even tol- 
erably alert and vigorous. If by miracle such 
an army should effect a landing on either shore, 
it could achieve nothing significant, unless the 
first expedition should be immediately followed 
by a second and a third. The scale of modern 
warfare between nations is too large for such 
remote expeditions, — no matter what the re- 
sources of the nation that should be rash enough 
to attempt them. 

Japan, being heavily burdened with debts in- 
curred in carrying on her wars with China and 
Russia and making internal improvements, could 
not borrow the money necessary in these days 
for waging aggressive war on a large scale at 
a distance, although she might fight success- 
fully on the defensive at or near home. That 
much she could doubtless do, as many other 
poor nations have done ; but her financial con- 
dition is such that she will be prevented from 



THE DESIBES AND AMBITIONS OF JAPAN 51 

engaging in offensive war for at least a genera- 
tion to come. Moreover, all the capital which 
Japanese merchants, manufacturers, and finan- 
ciers can possibly accumulate during the next 
thirty years, is urgently needed for the execution 
of public works and the expansion of industrial 
undertakings at home. The industrial and com- 
mercial interests of Japan require peace with all 
the other nations of the world. As Count Te- 
rauchi said to me at Seoul, " There is no interest 
of Japan which could possibly be promoted by 
war with the United States or any other nation; 
and conversely, there is no interest of the United 
States which could possibly be promoted by war 
with Japan . ' ' Such, as I have said before, was the 
opinion of every Japanese statesman and man 
of business with whom I talked in the summer 
of 1912; and many of these gentlemen said 
that they had never met any Japanese political 
or commercial leader who was not of that opin- 
ion. The entire commerce between Japan and 
the United States is for the mutual advantage 
of each country, and the United States is Japan's 
best customer. War between the two countries 
is not to be thought of; and to suppose that 
Japan would commit an act of aggression against 
the United States which would necessarily cause 



52 THE ROAD TOWARD PEACE 

war is wholly unreasonable, fantastic, and fool- 
ish, — the product of a morbid and timorous 
imagination. 

Japanese statesmen are not in favor of any 
extensive migrations of Japanese people to other 
lands. They want Japanese emigrants from their 
native islands to settle in neighboring Japanese 
territories. They hold that the Japanese home 
industries need all the labor the population can 
furnish. Japanese economists greatly prefer to 
the planting of Japanese capital or labor in for- 
eign lands the recent methods of planting foreign 
capital in Japan. When an American corpora- 
tion, which is conducting at home a successful 
industry, sells its patents and methods to a body 
of Japanese capitalists, and then takes a con- 
siderable portion of the stocks and bonds of the 
Japanese company, American capital finds a 
profitable investment, the Japanese laborers re- 
main at home, and the product of Japanese in- 
dustry is sold to advantage in the markets of 
the world. Japan wants foreign markets for its 
manufactured products. War, or any other ac- 
tion or event which interrupts commercial re- 
lations with other countries is adverse to Japan- 
ese interests. 

The right state of mind of Americans towards 



THE DESIBES AND AMBITIONS OF JAPAN 53 

Japan is one of hearty good-will and cordial 
admiration. Japan should receive every privi- 
lege in the United States which the "most 
favored nation" possesses j and that is all Japan 
wants from the United States, except the respect 
due to its achievements, and to the physical, 
intellectual, and moral qualities which have 
made these achievements possible. All classes 
in Japan, the uneducated as well as the educated, 
the poor as well as the rich, are sensitive about 
being treated, or thought of, as if they were a 
backward, semi-civilized, untrustworthy people. 
They wish to be regarded as a worthy member 
of the family of civilized nations. 

Wars and preparations for war continue, be- 
cause many of the causes of war in time past 
continue to exist. The Occidental peoples have 
for several centuries fought oftener and harder 
than the Oriental ; and the Christianity which 
prevails among them has little, if any, tendency 
to prevent their fighting among themselves, 
sometimes with ferocity, or to prevent them 
from attacking non-Christian peoples, if they 
think it their interest to do so. The Eastern 
peoples. Far and Near, as has been already 
mentioned, will have some causes of their own 
for war; because in some important instances 



54 THE ROAD TOWARD PEACE 

neither their geographical limits nor their gov- 
ernmental institutions are as yet settled. One 
Eastern people has recently acquired the whole 
of the Occidental art of war with its subsidiary 
sciences, and other Eastern peoples are on the 
way to the same acquisition. War will last until 
its causes are rooted out, and that extirpation 
will prove a slow and hard task. The Carnegie 
Endowment for International Peace is just enter- 
ing, therefore, on labors which will last for gen- 
erations. Its reliance must be on the slow-acting 
forces of education, sanitation, and conservation, 
on the promotion of mutual acquaintance and 
advantageous commercial intercourse with the 
resultant good-will among nations, and on the 
steady, patient use of the civilizing agencies 
which humane democracy and applied science 
have invented and set at work within the past 
hundred years. 

From the observations recorded in the above 
Report, certain inferences may be drawn con- 
cerning profitable expenditures for the promo- 
tion of international peace by the Division of 
Intercourse and Education of the Carnegie En- 
dowment for International Peace. It may be 
safely inferred that action in any of the follow- 
ing directions will bring nearer the coming of 



HOW TO BEING PEACE NEARER 55 

peace: — (1) Create or support agencies compe- 
tent to reduce, relieve, or prevent, so far as is 
each day possible, the wrongs, miseries, and 
illusions which have caused, and are still causing, 
wars. (2) Strengthen public opinion in favor of 
publicity in governmental and commercial trans- 
actions. (3) Suspect and probe all secrecies 
and hidings in the family, in industries, in legis- 
lation, and in administration. Oppressions and 
robberies are generally concocted in secret. It is 
one of the worst consequences of long-continued 
and severe oppression, that the resistance to it 
and revolution must be nursed in secret. In- 
quire, bring light, and publish. (4) Cultivate 
in all nations trusteeship, public spirit, and the 
application of private money to public uses. 
(5) Create or foster, in addition to universal 
elementary education, permanent educational 
agencies such as libraries, hospitals, dispensa- 
ries, training-schools for nurses, and technical 
and professional schools in countries which lack 
these instrumentalities. (6) Recognize frankly 
the present necessity of maintaining in all coun- 
tries armed forces for protective duty against 
aggression from without, or disintegration from 
within. (7) Strengthen international public 
opinion in favor of an international naval force 



66 THE ROAD TOWARD PEACE 

to secure peace and order on the seas, and a 
freedom that cannot be interrupted for water- 
borne commerce. (8) Foster those religious 
sentiments and those economic, industrial, and 
political principles which manifestly tend to 
purify and strengthen family life, and to secure 
liberty, domestic joys, public tranquillity, and 
the people's health, morality, and general well- 
being. 



CHAPTER V 

THE GREAT EUROPEAN WAR ITS CAUSES, 

SCOPE, AND OBJECTS WHAT GAINS FOR 

MANKIND CAN COME OUT OF IT^ 

The American people without distinction of 
party are highly content with the action of their 
National Administration on all the grave prob- 
lems presented to the Government by the sudden 
outbreak of long-prepared war in Europe — a 
war which already involves five great states and 
two small ones. They heartily approve of the 
action of the Administration on mediation, neu- 
trality, aid to Americans in Europe, discour- 
agement of speculation in foods, and, with the 
exception of extreme protectionists, admission 
to American registry of foreign-built ships ; 
although the legislation on the last subject, 
which has already passed Congress, is mani- 
festly inadequate. 

Our people cannot see that the war will nec- 
essarily be short, and they cannot imagine how 
it can last long. They realize that history gives 

^ A letter published in the New York Times of September 2, 
1914. 



68 THE BOAD TOWABD PEACE 

no example of such a general interruption of 
trade and all other international intercourse as 
has already taken place, or of such a stoppage 
of the production and distribution of the neces- 
saries of life as this war threatens. They shud- 
der at the floods of human woe which are about 
to overwhelm Europe. 

Hence, thinking Americans cannot help re- 
flecting on the causes of this monstrous outbreak 
of primitive savagery — part of them come down 
from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries 
and part developed in the nineteenth — and 
wondering what good for mankind, if any, can 
possibly come out of the present cataclysm. 

The whole people of the United States, 
without regard to racial origin, are of one mind 
in hoping that mankind may gain out of this 
prodigious physical combat, which uses for pur- 
poses of destruction and death all the new forces 
of nineteenth-century applied science, some new 
liberties and new securities in the pursuit of 
happiness ; but at this moment they can cherish 
only a remote hope of such an issue. The mili- 
tary force which Austria-Hungary and Germany 
are now using on a prodigious scale, and with 
long-studied skill, can only be met by similar 
military force, and this resisting force is sum- 



EARLY LESSONS FROM THE WAR 59 

moned more slowly than that of Austria-Hun- 
gary and Germany; although the ultimate 
battalions will be heavier. In this portentous 
physical contest the American people have no 
part ; their geographical position, their historical 
development, and their political ideals combine 
to make them for the present mere spectators; 
although their interests — commercial, indus- 
trial, and political — are deeply involved. For 
the moment, the best thing our Government can 
do is to utilize all existing neutrality rights, 
and, if possible, to strengthen or develop those 
rights ; for out of this war ought to come more 
neutral states in Europe, and greater security 
for neutralized territory. 

The chances of getting some gains for man- 
kind out of this gigantic struggle will be some- 
what increased if the American people, and all 
other neutral peoples, arrive through public 
discussion at some clear understanding of the 
causes and the possible and desirable issues of 
the war, and the sooner this public discussion 
begins, and the more thoroughly it is pursued, 
the sounder will probably be the tendencies of 
public sentiment outside of the contending 
nations, and the conclusions which the peace 
negotiations will ultimately reach. 



60 THE EOAD TOWABD PEACE 

When one begins, however, to reflect on the 
probable causes of the sudden lapse of the most 
civilized parts of Europe into worse than primi- 
tive savagery, he comes at once on two old and 
widespread evils in Europe from which America 
has been exempt for at least one hundred and 
fifty years. The first is secret diplomacy with 
power to make issues and determine events, and 
the second is autocratic national executives who 
can swing the whole physical force of the na- 
tion to this side or that without consulting the 
people or their representatives. 

The actual catastrophe proves that secret ne- 
gotiations, like those habitually conducted on 
behalf of the " Concert of Europe," and alliances 
between selected nations, the terms of which are 
secret, or, at any rate, not publicly stated, can- 
not avert in the long run outrageous war, but 
can only produce postponements of war, or short 
truces. Free institutions, like those of the United 
States, take the public into confidence, because 
all important movements of the Government 
must rest on popular desires, needs, and voli- 
tions. Autocratic institutions have no such ne- 
cessity for publicity. This Government secrecy 
as to motives, plans, and purposes must often 
be maintained by disregarding truth, fair deal- 



EABLY LESSONS FROM THE WAR 61 

ing, and honorable obligations, in order that, 
•when the appeal to force comes, one Govern- 
ment may secure the advantage of taking the 
other by surprise. Duplicity during peace and 
the breaking of treaties during war come to be 
regarded as obvious military necessities. 

The second great evil, under which certain 
large nations of Europe — notably Russia, Ger- 
many, and Austria-Hungary — have long suf- 
fered and still suffer, is the permanent na- 
tional executive, independent of popular control 
through representative bodies, holding strong 
views about rights of birth and religious sanc- 
tions of its authority, and really controlling the 
national forces through some small council and 
a strong bureaucracy. So long as executives of 
this sort endure, so long will civilization be 
liable to such explosions as have taken place 
this August, though not always on so vast a 
scale. 

Americans now see these things more clearly 
than European lovers of liberty, because Ameri- 
cans are detached from the actual conflicts by 
the Atlantic, and because Americans have had 
no real contact with the feudal or the imperial 
system for nearly three hundred years. Pilgrim 
and Puritan, Covenanter and Quaker, Lutheran 



62 THE ROAD TOWARD PEACE 

and Catholic alike left the feudal system and 
autocratic government behind them when they 
crossed the Atlantic. Americans, therefore, can- 
not help hoping that two results of the present 
war will be : (1) The abolition of secret diplo- 
macy and secret understandings, and the sub- 
stitution therefor of treaties publicly discussed 
and sanctioned, and (2) the creation of national 
executives — emperors, sultans, kings, or presi- 
dents — which cannot use the national forces 
in fight until a thoroughly informed national 
assembly, acting with deliberation, has agreed 
to that use. 

The American student of history since the 
middle of the seventeenth century sees clearly 
two strong though apparently opposite ten- 
dencies in Europe : First, the tendency to the 
creation and maintenance of small states such 
as those which the Peace of Westphalia (1648) 
recognized and for two centuries secured in a 
fairly independent existence, and, secondly, a 
tendency from the middle of the nineteenth 
century toward larger national units, created by 
combining several kindred states under one ex- 
ecutive. This second tendency was illustrated 
strongly in the case of both Germany and Italy, 
although the Prussian domination in Germany 



EARLY LESSONS FBOM THE WAR 63 

has no parallel in Italy. Somewhat earlier in 
the nineteenth century the doctrine of the neu- 
tralization of the territories of small states was 
established as firmly as solemn treaties could 
do it. The larger national units had a more or 
less federative quality, the components yielding 
some of their functions to a central power, but 
retaining numerous independent functions. This 
tendency to limited unification is one which 
Americans easily understand and appreciate. 
We believe in the federative principle, and must 
therefore hope that out of the present European 
horror will come a new development of that prin- 
ciple, and new security for small states which are 
capable of guaranteeing to their citizens " life, 
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness " — a secu- 
rity which no citizen of any European country 
seems to-day to possess. 

Some of the underlying causes of the horri- 
ble catastrophe the American people are now 
watching from afar are commercial and eco- 
nomic. Imperial Germany's desire for colonies 
in other continents — such as Great Britain 
and France secured earlier as a result of keen 
commercial ambitions — is intense. Prussia's 
seizure of Schleswig in 1864-65 had the com- 
mercial motive ; and it is with visions of ports 



64 THE ROAD TOWARD PEACE 

on the North Sea that Germany justifies her 
present occupation of Belgium. The Russians 
have for generations desired to extend their 
national territory southward to the ^Egean and 
the Bosphorus, and eastward to good harbors 
on the Pacific. Lately they pushed into Mon- 
golia and Manchuria, but were resisted success- 
fully by Japan. Austria-Hungary has long been 
seeking ports on the Adriatic, and lately seized 
without warrant Herzegovina and Bosnia to 
promote her approach toward the -^Egean, and 
is now trying to seize Serbia with the same ends 
in view. With similar motives Italy lately de- 
scended on Tripoli, without any excuse except 
this intense desire for colonies — profitable or 
unprofitable. On the other hand, the American 
people, looking to the future as well as to the 
past, object to acquisitions of new territory by 
force of arms ; and since the twentieth century 
opened they have twice illustrated in their 
own practice — first in Cuba, and then in Mex- 
ico — this democratic objection. They believe 
that extensions of national territory should be 
brought about only with the indubitable con- 
sent of the majority of the people most nearly 
concerned. They also believe that commerce 
should always be a means of promoting good- 



EARLY LESSONS FROM THE WAR 65 

will, and not ill-will, among men, and that all 
legitimate and useful extensions of the com- 
merce of a manufacturing and commercial na- 
tion may be procured through the policy of the 
** open door " — which means nothing more 
than that all nations should be allowed to com- 
pete on equal terms for the trade of any foreign 
people, whether backward or advanced in civil- 
ization. No American Administration has ac- 
cepted a " concession " of land in China. They 
also believe that peaceable extensions of terri- 
tory and trade will afford adequate relief from 
the economic pressure on a population too large 
for the territory it occupies, and that there is 
no need of forcible seizure of territory to secure 
relief. It is inevitable, therefore, that the Amer- 
ican people should hope that one outcome of 
the present war should be — no enlargement 
of a national territory by force or without the 
free consent of the population to be annexed, 
and no colonization except by peaceable com- 
mercial and industrial methods. 

One of the most interesting and far-reaching 
effects of the present outbreak of savagery is 
likely to be the conviction it carries to the 
minds of thinking people that the whole pro- 
cess of competitive armaments, the enlistment 



66 THE ROAD TOWAED PEACE 

of the entire male population in national armies, 
and the incessant planning of campaigns against 
neighbors, is not a trustworthy method for pre- 
serving peace. It now appears that the military 
preparations of the last fifty years in Europe 
have resulted in the most terrific war of all 
time, and that a fierce ultimate outbreak is the 
only probable result of the system. For the 
future of civilization this is a lesson of high 
value. It teaches that if modern civilization is 
to be preserved, national executives — whether 
imperial or republican — must not have at their 
disposal immense armaments and drilled armies 
held ready in the leash ; that armaments must 
be limited, an international supreme court estab- 
lished, national armies changed to the Swiss 
form, and an international force adequate to 
deal with any nation that may suddenly become 
lawless agreed upon by treaty and held always 
in readiness. The occasional use of force will 
continue to be necessary even in the civilized 
world ; but it must be made not an aggressive, 
but a protective, force, and used as such — just 
as protective force has to be used sometimes in 
families, schools, cities, and commonwealths. 

At present, Americans do not close their eyes 
to the plain fact that the brute force which Ger- 



EABLY LESSONS FBOM THE WAR 67 

many and Austria-Hungary are now using can 
only be overcome by brute force of the same 
sort in larger measure. It is only when negotia- 
tions for peace begin that the great lesson o£ 
the futility of huge preparations for fighting to 
preserve peace can be given effect. Is it too much 
to expect that the whole civilized world will take 
to heart the lessons of this terrible catastrophe, 
and cooperate to prevent the recurrence of such 
losses and woes ? Should Germany and Austria- 
Hungary succeed in their present undertak- 
ings, the civilized nations would be obliged to 
bear continuously, and to an ever-increasing 
amount, the burdens of great armaments, and 
would live in constant fear of sudden invasion, 
now here, now there — a terrible fear, against 
which neither treaties nor professions of peace- 
able intentions would offer the least security. 

It must be admitted, however, that the whole 
military organization, which has long been com- 
pulsory on the nations of continental Europe, 
is inconsistent in the highest degree with Amer- 
ican ideals of individual liberty and social prog^ 
ress. Democracies can fight with ardor, and 
sometimes with success, when the whole people 
is moved by a common sentiment or passion ; 
but the structure and discipline of a modern 



68 THE BOAD TOWAED PEACE 

army like that of Germany, Austria-Hungary, 
or Russia has a despotic or autocratic quality 
which is inconsistent with the fundamental 
principles of democratic society. To make war 
in countries like France, Great Britain, and the 
United States requires the widespread, simul- 
taneous stirring of the passions of the people 
on behalf of their own ideals. This stirring re- 
quires publicity before and after the declaration 
of war and public discussion ; and the delays 
which discussion causes are securities for peace. 
Out of the present struggle should come a 
check on militarism — a strong revulsion against 
the use of force as means of settling interna- 
tional disputes. 

It must also be admitted that it is impossible 
for the American people to sympathize with the 
tone of the imperial and royal addresses which, 
in summoning the people to war, use such 
phrases as " My monarchy," " My loyal peo- 
ple," or " My loyal subjects " ; for there is im- 
plied in such phrases a dynastic or personal 
ownership of peoples which shocks the average 
American. Americans inevitably think that the 
right way for a ruler to begin an exhortation 
to the people he rules is President Wilson's 
way — " My fellow countrymen." 



EARLY LESSONS FROM THE WAR 69 

It follows from the very existence of these 
American instincts and hopes that, although the 
people of the United States mean to maintain 
faithfully a legal neutrality, they are not, and 
cannot be, neutral or indifferent as to the ulti- 
mate outcome of this titanic struggle. It already 
seems to them that England, France, and Rus- 
sia are fighting for freedom and civilization. It 
does not follow that thinking Americans will 
forget the immense services which Germany 
has rendered to civilization during the last hun- 
dred years, or desire that her power to serve 
letters, science, art, and education should be in 
the least abridged in the outcome of this war, 
upon which she has entered so rashly and self- 
ishly, and in so barbarous a spirit. Most edu- 
cated Americans hope and believe that by de- 
feating the German barbarousness the Allies 
will only promote the noble German civilization. 

The presence of Russia in the combination 
against Germany and Austria-Hungary seems 
to the average American an abnormal phenom- 
enon ; because Russia is itself a military mon- 
archy with marked territorial ambitions; and 
its civilization is at a more elementary stage 
than that of France or England ; but he resists 
present apprehension on this score by recalling 



70 THE BOAD TOWABD PEACE 

that Russia submitted to the " Concert of Eu- 
rope " when her victorious armies were within 
seventeen miles of Constantinople, that she 
emancipated her serfs, proposed the Hague 
Conferences, initiated the " Douma," and has 
lately offered — perhaps as war measures only 
— autonomy to her Poles and equal rights of 
citizenship to her Jews. He also cannot help 
believing that a nation which has produced such 
a literature as Russia has produced during the 
last fifty years must hold within its multitudi- 
nous population a large minority which is seeth- 
ing with high aspirations and a fine idealism. 

For the clarification of the public mind on 
the issues involved, it is important that the 
limits of American neutrality should be dis- 
cussed and understood. The action of the Gov- 
ernment must be neutral in the best sense ; but 
American sympathies and hopes cannot possi- 
bly be neutral; for the whole history and pres- 
ent state of American liberty forbids. For the 
present, thinking Americans can only try to 
appreciate the scope and real issues of this 
formidable convulsion, and so be ready to seize 
every opportunity that may present itself to 
further the cause of human freedom, and of 
peace at last. 



CHAPTER VI 

TRUE NATIONAL GREATNESS ARE ITS FOUN- 
DATIONS IMPERIALISM OR DEMOCRACY, FIGHT- 
ING POWER OR SOLEMN PUBLIC COMPACTS?* 

There is nothing new in the obsession of the 
principal European nations that, in order to be 
great and successful in the world as it is, they 
must possess military power available for instant 
aggression on weak nations, as well as for ef- 
fective defence against strong ones. 

When Sir Francis Bacon wrote his essay on 
" The True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates," 
he remarked that forts, arsenals, goodly races 
of horses, armaments, and the like would all be 
useless " except the breed and disposition of the 
people be stout and warlike." He denied that 
money is the sinews of war, giving preference 
to the sinews of men's arms, and quoted Solon's 
remark to Croesus, " Sir, if any other come that 
hath better iron than you, he will be master of 
all this gold " — a truly Bismarckian proposi- 
tion. Indeed, Sir Francis Bacon says explicitly 

* A letter published in the New York Times of Sept. 22, 
1914. 



72 TEE ROAD TOWAED PEACE 

that " the principal point of greatness in any 
state is to have a race of military men." 

Goethe, reflecting on the wretchedness of the 
German people as a whole, found no comfort 
in the German genius for science, literature, and 
art, or only a miserable comfort which " does not 
make up for the proud consciousness of belong- 
ing to a nation strong, respected, and feared." 
Because Germany in his time was weak in the 
military sense, he could write : " I have often 
felt a bitter grief at the thought of the German 
people, which is so noble individually, and so 
wretched as a whole "; and he longed for the day 
when the national spirit, kept alive and hopeful, 
should be " ready to rise in all its might, when 
the day of glory dawns." 

" The day of glory " was to be the day of 
military power. Carlyle said of Germany and 
France in November, 1870, "that noble, pa- 
tient, deep, pious, and solid Germany should 
be at length welded into a nation, and become 
Queen of the Continent, instead of vaporing, 
vainglorious, gesticulating, quarrelsome, rest- 
less, and oversensitive France, seems to me the 
hopefuUest public fact that has occurred in my 
time." How did Germany attain to this posi- 
tion of " Queen of the Continent " ? By creat- 



thue national gbeatness 73 

ing and maintaining, with utmost intelligence 
and skill, the strongest army in Europe — an 
army, which, within six years, had been used 
successfully against Denmark, Austria, and 
France. Germany became " Queen " by virtue 
of her military power. 

In the same paper, Carlyle said of the French 
Revolution, of which he was himself the great 
portrayer, " I often call that a celestial infernal 
phenomenon, the most memorable in our world 
for a thousand years; on the whole, a tran- 
scendent revolt against the devil and his works 
(since shams are all and sundry of the devil, 
and poisonous and unendurable to man)." Now, 
the French Revolution was an extraordinary 
outbreak of passionate feeling and physical vio- 
lence on the part of the French nation, both at 
home and abroad ; and it led on to the Napo- 
leonic wars, which were tremendous physical 
struggles for mastery in Europe. 

In a recent public statement two leading 
philosophical writers of modern Germany, Pro- 
fessors Eucken and Haeckel, denounce the 
''brutal national egoism" of England, which, 
they say, "recognizes no rights on the part of 
others, and, unconcerned about morality or un- 
morality, pursues only its own advantage "; and 



74 THE EOAD TOWARD PEACE 

they attribute to England the purpose to hinder 
at any cost the further growth of German 
greatness. But what are the elements of that 
German greatness which England is determined 
to arrest by joining France and Russia in war 
against Germany and Austria-Hungary? The 
three elements of recent German greatness are 
the extension of her territory — contiguous 
territories in Europe and in other continents 
colonial possessions; the enlargement of Ger- 
man commerce and wealth; and to these ends 
the firm establishment of her military suprem- 
acy in Europe. These are the ideas on the true 
greatness of nations which have prevailed in 
the ruling oligarchy of Germany for at least 
sixty years, and now seem to have been ac- 
cepted, or acquiesced in, by the whole German 
people. In this view, the foundation of national 
greatness is fighting power. 

This conception of national greatness has 
prevailed at many different epochs, — Macedo- 
nian, Roman, Saracen, Spanish, English, and 
French, — and, indeed, has appeared from time 
to time in almost all the nations and tribes of 
the earth ; but the civilized world is now look- 
ing for better foundations of national greatness 
than force and fighting. 



TRUE NATIONAL GREATNESS 75 

The partial successes of democracy in Eu- 
rope have much increased the evils of war. Sir 
Francis Bacon looked for a fighting class ; un- 
der the feudal system when a baron went to 
war he took with him his vassals, or that por- 
tion of them that could be spared from the 
fields at home. Universal conscription is a mod- 
ern invention, the horrors of which, as now 
exhibited in Kussia, Germany, Austria-Hun- 
gary, and France, much exceed those of earlier 
martial methods. There has never been such an 
interruption of agricultural and industrial pro- 
duction, or such a rending of family ties in con- 
sequence of war as is now taking place in the 
greater part of Europe. Moreover, mankind has 
never before had the use of such destructive 
implements as the machine gun, the torpedo, 
and the dynamite bomb. The progress of sci- 
ence has much increased the potential destruc- 
tiveness of warfare. 

Thinking people in all the civilized countries 
are asking themselves what the fundamental 
trouble with civilization is, and where to look 
for means of escape from the present intolerable 
conditions. Christianity in nineteen centuries 
has afforded no relief. The so-called mitigations 
of war are comparatively trivial. The recent 



76 THE BOAB TOWARD PEACE 

Balkan wars were as ferocious as those of Alex- 
ander. The German aviators drop aimless bombs 
at night into cities occupied chiefly by non- 
combatants. The North Sea is strewn with float- 
ing mines which may destroy fishing, freight, 
or passenger vessels of any nation, neutral or 
belligerent, which have business on that sea. 
The ruthless destruction of the Louvain Library 
by German soldiers reminds people who have 
read history that the destroyers of the Alexan- 
dria Library have ever since been called fanat- 
ics and barbarians. The German army tries to 
compel unfortified Belgian cities and towns to 
pay huge ransoms to save themselves from de- 
struction — a method which the Barbary States, 
indeed, were accustomed to use against their 
Christian neighbors, but which has long been 
held to be appropriate only for brigands and 
pirates — Greek, Sicilian, Syrian, or Chinese. 

How can it be that the Government of a civ- 
ilized state commits, or permits in its agents, 
such barbarities? The fundamental reason seems 
to be that most of the European nations still 
believe that national greatness depends on the 
possession and brutal use of force, and is to be 
maintained and magnified only by military and 
naval power. 



TBUE NATIONAL GREATNESS 77 

In North America there are two large com- 
munities — heretofore inspired chiefly by ideals 
of English origin — which have never main- 
tained conscripted armies, and have never forti- 
fied against each other their long frontier — 
Canada and the United States. Both may fairly 
be called great peoples even now ; and both give 
ample promise for the future. Neither of these 
peoples lacks the " stout and warlike " quality 
of which Sir Francis Bacon spoke ; both have 
often exhibited it. The United States suffered 
for four years from a civil war, characterized 
by determined fighting in indecisive battles, in 
which the losses, in proportion to the number 
of men engaged, were often much heavier than 
any thus far reported from the present battle- 
fields in Belgium and France. There being, then, 
no lack of martial spirit in these two peoples, 
it is an instructive phenomenon that power to 
conquer is not their ideal of national greatness. 
Much the same thing may be said of some other 
self-governing constituents of the British Em- 
pire, such as Australia, New Zealand, and South 
Africa. They, too, have a better ideal of na- 
tional greatness than that of military suprem- 
acy. 

What are the real ambitions and hopes of the 



78 THE BOAD TOWABD PEACE 

people of the United States and the people of 
Canada in regard to their own future ? Their 
expectations of greatness certainly are not based 
on any conception of invincible military force, 
or desire for the physical means of enforcing 
their own will on their neighbors. They both 
believe in the free commonwealth, administered 
justly, and with the purpose of securing for 
each individual all the freedom he can exercise 
without injury to his neighbors and the collec- 
tive well-being. They desire for themselves, each 
for itself, a strong government, equipped to 
perform its functions with dignity, certainty, 
and efficiency ; but they wish to have that gov- 
ernment under the control of the deliberate pub- 
lic opinion of free citizens, and not under the 
control of any Praetorian Guard, Oligarchic 
Council, or General Staff, and they insist that 
the civil authority should always control such 
military and police forces as it may be necessary 
to maintain for protective purposes. 

They believe that the chief object of govern- 
ment should be the promotion of the public wel- 
fare by legislative and administrative means ; 
that the processes of government should be open 
and visible, and their results be incessantly pub- 
lished for approval or disapproval. They believe 



TRUE NATIONAL GREATNESS 79 

that a nation becomes great through industrial 
productiveness and the resulting internal and 
external commerce, through the gradual in- 
crease of comfort and general well-being in the 
population, and through the advancement of 
science, letters, and art. They believe that edu- 
cation, free intercourse with other nations, and 
religious enthusiasm and toleration are means 
of national greatness, and that in the develop- 
ment and use of these means force has no place. 
They attribute national greatness in others, as 
well as in themselves, not to the possession of 
military force, but to the advance of the people 
in freedom, industry, righteousness, and good- 
will. 

They believe that the ideals of fighting power 
and domination should be replaced by the ideals 
of peaceful competition in production and trade, 
of generous rivalry in education, scientific dis- 
covery, and the fine arts, of cooperation for 
mutual benefit among nations different in size, 
natural abilities, and material resources, and of 
federation among nations associated geograph- 
ically or historically, or united in the pursuit 
of some common ends and in the cherishing of 
like hopes and aspirations. They think that the 
peace of the world can be best promoted by sol- 



80 THE ROAD TOWABD PEACE 

emn public compacts between peoples — not 
princes or cabinets — compacts made to be kept, 
strengthened by mutual services and good of- 
fices, and watched over by a permanent inter- 
national judicial tribunal authorized to caU on 
the affiliated nations for whatever force may be 
necessary to induce obedience to its decrees. 

Will not the civilized world learn from this 
horrible European war — the legitimate result 
of the policies of Bismarck and his associates 
and disciples — that these democratic ideals con- 
stitute the rational substitute for the imperial- 
istic ideal of fighting force as the foundation of 
national greatness? The new ideals will still 
need the protection and support, both within 
and without each nation, of a restrained public 
force, acting under law, national and interna- 
tional, just as a sane mind needs as its agent a 
sound and strong body. Health and vigor will 
continue to be the safeguards of morality, jus- 
tice and mercy. ^ 



CHAPTER Vn 

SOME GEOUNDS FOR AMERICAN SYMPATHY WITH 
MODERN GERMANY WHY AMERICAN OPIN- 
ION FAVORS THE ALLIES IN THE GREAT WAR 
THE MOST FAVORABLE ISSUE OF THE WAR^ 

The numerous pamphlets which German writ- 
ers are now distributing in the United States, 
and the many letters about the European war 
which Americans are now receiving from Ger- 
man and German-American friends, are con- 
vincing thoughtful people in this country that 
American public opinion has some weight with 
the German Government and people, or, at least, 
some interest for them ; but that the reasons 
which determine American sympathy with the 
Allies, rather than with Germany and Austria- 
Hungary, are not understood in Germany, and 
are not always appreciated by persons of Ger- 
man birth who have lived long in the United 
States. 

It would be a serious mistake to suppose that 
Americans feel any hostility or jealousy toward 

^ A letter published in the New York Times of October 2, 
1914. 



82 THE ROAD TOWABD PEACE 

Germany, or fail to recognize the immense ob- 
ligations under which she has placed all the rest 
of the world ; although they now feel that the 
German nation has been going wrong in theo- 
retical and practical politics for more than a 
hundred years, and is to-day reaping the conse- 
quences of her own wrong-thinking and wrong- 
doing. 

There are many important matters concern- 
ing which American sympathy is strongly with 
Germany: (1) The unification of Germany, 
which Bismarck and his co-workers accom- 
plished, naturally commended itself to Ameri- 
cans, whose own country is a firm federation of 
many more or less different States, containing 
more or less different peoples. While most 
Americans did not approve Bismarck's methods 
and means, they cordially approved his accom- 
pHshment of German unification. (2) Americans 
have felt unquahfied admiration for the com- 
mercial and financial growth of Germany during 
the past forty years, believing it to be primarily 
the fruit of well-directed industry and enter- 
prise. (3) All educated Americans feel strong 
gratitude to the German nation for its extraor- 
dinary achievements in letters, science, and edu- 
cation within the last hundred years. Jealousy 



GROUNDS FOR SYMPATHY WITH GERMANY 83 

of Germany in these matters is absolutely for- 
eign to American thought, and that any external 
power or influence should undertake to restrict 
or impair German progress in these respects 
would seem to all Americans intolerable, and, 
indeed, incredible. (4) All Americans who have 
had any experience in governmental or educa- 
tional administration recognize the fact that 
German administration — both in peace and in 
war — is the most ef&cient in the world ; and 
for that efficiency they feel nothing but respect 
and admiration, unless the efficiency requires an 
inexpedient suppression or restriction of indi- 
vidual liberty. (5) Americans sympathize with 
a unanimous popular sentiment in favor of a war 
which the people believe to be essential to the 
greatness, and even the safety, of their country 
— a sentiment which prompts to family and 
property sacrifices very distressing at the mo- 
ment, and irremediable in the future ; and they 
believe that the German people are inspired to- 
day by just such an overwhelming sentiment. 
How is it, then, that, with all these strong 
American feelings tending to make them sym- 
pathize with the German people in good times 
or bad, in peace or in war, the whole weight of 
American opinion is on the side of the Allies 



84 THE ROAD TOWARD PEACE 

in the present war ? The reasons are to be found, 
of course, in the political and social history of 
the American people, and in its governmental 
philosophy and practice to-day. These reasons 
have come out of the past, and are entrenched 
in all the present ideals and practices of the 
American Commonwealth. They inevitably lead 
Americans to object strongly and irrevocably 
to certain German national practices of great 
moment, practices which are outgrowths of 
Prussian theories and experiences that have 
come to prevail in Germany during the past 
hundred years. In the hope that American pub- 
lic opinion about the European war may be a 
little better understood abroad, it seems worth 
while to enumerate those German practices 
which do not conform to American standards 
in the conduct of public affairs : — 

(1) Americans object to the committal of a 
nation to grave measures of foreign policy by 
a permanent executive — czar, kaiser, or king 
— advised in secret by professional diplomatists 
who consider themselves the personal represen- 
tatives of their respective sovereigns. The 
American people have no permanent executive, 
and the profession of diplomacy hardly exists 
among them. In the conduct of their national 



AMERICAN OPINION AND THE ALLIES 85 

affairs they utterly distrust secrecy, and are 
accustomed to demand and secure the utmost 
publicity. 

(2) They object to placing in any ruler's 
hands the power to order mobilization or de- 
clare war in advance of deliberate consultation 
with a representative assembly, and of coopera- 
tive action thereby. The fact that German 
mobilization was ordered three days in advance 
of the meeting of the Reichstag confounds all 
American ideas and practices about the rights 
of the people and the proper limits of the ex- 
ecutive authority. 

(3) The secrecy of European diplomatic in- 
tercourse and of international understandings 
and terms of alliance in Europe is in the view 
of ordinary Americans not only inexpedient, 
but dangerous and unjustifiable. Under the 
Constitution of the United States no treaty ne- 
gotiated by the President and his Cabinet is 
valid until it has been publicly discussed and 
ratified by the Senate. During this discussion 
the people can make their voice heard through 
the press, the telegraph, and the telephone. 

(4) The reliance on military force as the 
foundation of true national greatness seems to 
thinking Americans erroneous, and in the long 



86 THE BOAD TOWARD PEACE 

run degrading to a Christian nation. They con- 
ceive that the United States may fairly be called 
a great nation ; but that its greatness is due to 
intellectual and moral forces acting through 
adequate material forces, and expressed in edu- 
cation, public health and order, agriculture, 
manufacturing, and commerce, and the result- 
ing general well-being of the people. It has 
never in all its history organized what could be 
called a standing or a conscripted army ; and, 
until twenty years ago, its navy was very small, 
considering the length of its seacoasts. There 
is nothing in the history of the American peo- 
ple to make them believe that the true greatness 
of nations depends on military power. 

(5) They object to the extension of national 
territory by force, contrary to the wishes of 
the population concerned. This objection is 
the inevitable result of democratic institutions; 
and the American people have been faithful 
to this democratic opinion under circumstances 
of considerable difficulty — as, for example, in 
withdrawing from Cuba, the rich island which 
had been occupied by American troops during 
the short war with Spain (1898), and in the 
refusing to intervene by force in Mexico for 
the protection of American investors, when 



AMERICAN OPINION AND THE ALLIES 87 

that contiguous country was distracted by fac- 
tional fighting. This objection applies to long- 
past acts of the German Government, as well 
as to its proceedings in the present war — as, 
for example, to the taking of Schleswig-Holstein 
and Alsace-Lorraine, as well as to the projected 
annexation of Belgium. 

(6) Americans object strenuously to the vio- 
lation of treaties between nations on the alle- 
gation of military necessity, or for any other 
reason whatever. They believe that the prog- 
ress of civilization will depend in future on the 
general acceptance of the sanctity of contracts 
or solemn agreements between nations, and on 
the development by common consent of inter- 
national law. The neutralization treaties, the 
arbitration treaties, the Hague Conferences, 
and some of the serious attempts at mediation, 
although none of them go far enough, and 
many of them have been rudely violated on 
occasion, illustrate a strong tendency in the 
civilized parts of the world to prevent inter- 
national wars by means of agreements deliber- 
ately made in time of peace. The United States 
has proposed and made more of these agree- 
ments than any other power, has adhered to 
them, and profited by them. Under one such 



88 TEE ROAD TOWARD PEACE 

agreement, made nearly a hundred years ago, 
Canada and the United States have avoided 
forts and armaments against each other, al- 
though they have had serious differences of 
opinion and clashes of interests, and the fron- 
tier is three thousand miles long and for the 
most part without natural barriers. Cherishing 
the hope that the peace of Europe and the 
rights of its peoples may be secured through 
solemn compacts (which should include the 
establishment of a permanent international 
judicial tribunal, supported by an international 
force), Americans see, in the treatment by the 
German Government of the Belgium neutral- 
ization treaty as nothing but a piece of paper 
which might be torn up on the ground of mili- 
tary necessity, evidence of the adoption by 
Germany of a retrograde policy of the most 
alarming sort. That single act on the part of 
Germany — the violation of the neutral terri- 
tory of Belgium — would have determined 
American opinion in favor of the Alhes, if it 
had stood alone by itself — the reason being 
that American hopes for the peace and order 
of the world are based on the sanctity of 
treaties. 

(7) American public opinion, however, has 



AMERICAN OPINION AND THE ALLIES 89 

been greatly shocked in other ways by the 
German conduct of the war. The American 
common people see no justification for the 
dropping of bombs, to which no specific aim 
can be given, into cities and towns chiefly in- 
habited by non-combatants, the burning or 
blowing up of large portions of unfortified 
towns and cities, the destruction of precious 
monuments and treasuries of art, the strewing 
of floating mines through the North Sea, the 
exacting of ransoms from cities and towns 
under threat of destroying them, and the hold- 
ing of unarmed citizens as hostages for the 
peaceable behavior of a large population under 
threat of summary execution of the hostages 
in case of any disorder. All these seem to 
Americans unnecessary, inexpedient, and un- 
justifiable methods of warfare, sure to breed 
hatred and contempt toward the nation that 
uses them, and therefore to make it difficult for 
future generations to maintain peace and order 
in Europe. They cannot help imagining the 
losses civilization would suffer if the Russians 
should ever carry into Western Europe the 
kind of war which the Germans are now wag- 
ing in Belgium and France. They have sup- 
posed that war was to be waged in this century 



90 THE BOAD TOWAED PEACE 

only against public armed forces and their 
supplies and shelters. 

These opinions and prepossessions on the 
part of the American people have obviously 
grown out of the ideals which the early English 
colonists carried with them to the American 
wilderness in the seventeenth century, out of 
the long fighting and public discussion which 
preceded the adoption of the Constitution of 
the United States in the eighteenth century, 
and out of the peculiar experiences of the free 
Commonwealths which make up the United 
States, as they have spread across the almost 
uninhabited continent during the past hundred 
and twenty-five years. 

The experience and the situation of modern 
Germany have been utterly different. Germany 
was divided for centuries into discordant parts, 
had ambitious and martial neighbors, and often 
felt the weight of their attacks. Out of war 
came accessions of territory for Prussia, and at 
last German unity. The reliance of intelligent 
and patriotic Germany on military force as the 
basis of national greatness is a natural result 
of its experiences. Americans, however, be- 
lieve that this reliance is unsound both theo- 
retically and practically. The wars in Europe 



AMERICAN OPINION AND THE ALLIES 91 

since 1870-71, the many threatenings of war, 
and the present catastrophe seem to Americans 
to demonstrate that no amount of military 
preparedness on the part of the nations of 
Europe can possibly keep the peace of the 
Continent, or indeed prevent frequent explo- 
sions of destructive warfare. They think, too, 
that preparation for war on the part of Ger- 
many better than any of her neighbors can 
make will not keep her at peace or protect her 
from invasion, even if this better preparation 
include advantages of detail which have been 
successfully kept secret. All the nations which 
surround Germany are capable of developing a 
strong fighting spirit ; and all the countries of 
Europe, except England and Russia, possess 
the means of quickly assembling and getting 
into action great bodies of men. In other 
words, all the European states are capable 
of developing a passionate patriotism, and all 
possess the railroads, roads, conveyances, tele- 
graphs, and telephones which make rapid mo- 
bilization possible. No perfection of military 
forces, and no amount of previous study of 
feasible campaigns against neighbors, can give 
peaceful security to Germany in the present 
condition of the great European states. In the 



92 TBE ROAD TOWARD PEACE 

actual development of weapons and munitions, 
and of the art of quick entrencbing, the attack- 
ing force in battle on land is at a great disad- 
vantage in comparison vrith the force on the 
defensive. That means indecisive battles and 
ultimately an indecisive war, unless each party 
is resolved to push the war to the utter exhaus- 
tion and humiliation of the other — a long 
process which involves incalculable losses and 
wastes, and endless miseries. Americans have 
always before them the memory of their four 
years' civil war, which, although resolutely 
prosecuted on both sides, could not be brought 
to a close until the resources of the Southern 
States in men and material were exhausted. In 
that dreadful process the quick capital of the 
Southern States was wiped out. 

Now that the sudden attack on Paris has 
failed, and adequate time has been secured to 
summon the slower-moving forces of Russia 
and England, and these two resolute and per- 
sistent peoples have decided to use all their 
spiritual and material forces in cooperation 
with France against Germany, thoughtful 
Americans can see but one possible issue of 
the struggle, whether it be long or short, 
namely, the defeat of Germany and Austria- 



AMERICAN OPINION AND THE ALLIES 93 

Hungary in their present undertakings, and 
the abandonment by both peoples of the doc- 
trine that their salvation depends on militarism 
and the maintenance of autocratic executives 
entrusted with the power and the means to 
make sudden war. They believe that no human 
being should ever be trusted with such power. 
The alternative is, of course, genuine constitu- 
tional government, with the military power 
subject to the civil power. 

The American people grieve over the fruit- 
less sacrifices of life, property, and the natural 
human joys which the German people are mak- 
ing to a wrong and impossible ideal of national 
power and welfare. The sacrifices which Ger- 
many is imposing on the Allies are fearfully 
heavy ; but there is reason to hope that these 
will not be fruitless, for out of them may come 
great gains for liberty and peace in Europe. 

All experienced readers on this side of the 
Atlantic are well aware that nine tenths of all 
the reports they get about the war come from 
English and French sources, and this knowl- 
edge makes them careful not to form judg- 
ments about details until the events and deeds 
tell their own story. They cannot even tell 
to which side victory inclines in a long, far- 



94 TEE ROAD TOWARD PEACE 

extended battle, until recognizable changes in 
the positions of the combatants show what 
the successes or failures must have been. The 
English and French win some advantage so 
far as the formation of public opinion in this 
country is concerned ; because those two Gov- 
ernments send hither of&cial reports on current 
events more frequently than the German Gov- 
ernment does, and with more corroborative 
details. The amount of secrecy with which 
the campaign is surrounded on both sides is, 
however, a new and unwelcome experience for 
both the English and the American public. 

The pamphlets by German publicists and 
men of letters which are now coming to this 
country, and the various similar publications 
written here, seem to indicate that the German 
public is still kept by its Government in igno- 
rance about the real antecedents of the war 
and about many of the incidents and aspects of 
the portentous combat. These documents seem 
to Americans to contain a large amount of mis- 
information about the attack of Austria-Hun- 
gary on Serbia, the diplomatic negotiations 
and the correspondence between the sovereigns 
which immediately preceded the war, and the 
state of mind of the Belgian and English peo- 



AMERICAN OPINION AND TEE ALLIES 95 

pies. American believers in the good sense and 
good feeling of the common people naturally 
imagine, when an awful calamity befalls a na- 
tion, that the people cannot have been warned 
of its approach, else they would have avoided 
it. In this case they fear that the German Em- 
peror, Chancellery, and General Staff have 
themselves been misinformed in important re- 
spects, have made serious miscalculations which 
they are proposing to conceal as long as possi- 
ble, and are not taking the common people 
into their confidence. American sympathies are 
with the German people in their sufferings 
and losses, but not with their rulers, or with the 
military class, or with the professors and men 
of letters who have been teaching for more than 
a generation that Might makes Right. That 
short phrase contains the fundamental fallacy 
which for fifty years has been poisoning the 
springs of German thought and German policy 
on public affairs. 

Dread of the Muscovite does not seem to 
Americans a reasonable explanation of the 
present actions of Germany and Austria-Hun- 
gary, except so far as irrational panic can be 
said to be an explanation. Against possible, 
though not probable, Russian aggression, a firm 



96 THE ROAD TOWARD PEACE 

defensive alliance of all Western Europe would 
be a much better protection than the single 
Might of Germany. It were easy to imagine 
also two new " buffer " states — a reconstructed 
Poland and a Balkan Confederation. As to 
French "revenge," it is the inevitable and 
praiseworthy consequence of Germany's treat- 
ment of France in 1870-71. The great success 
of Germany in expanding her commerce during 
the past thirty years makes it hard for Ameri- 
cans to understand the hot indignation of the 
Germans against the British because of what- 
ever ineffective opposition Great Britain may 
have offered to that expansion. No amount of 
commercial selfishness on the part of insular 
England can justify Germany in attempting to 
seize supreme power in Europe and thence, per- 
haps, in the world. 

Finally, Americans hope and expect that 
there will be no such fatal issue of the present 
struggle as the destruction or ruin of the Ger- 
man nation. On the contrary, they believe that 
Germany will be freer, happier, and greater 
than ever, when once she has got rid of the 
monstrous Bismarck policies and the Emperor's 
archaic conception of his function, and has en- 
joyed twenty years of real peace. 



CHAPTER VIII 
America's duty in regard to the European 

WAR^ 

Duties often grow out of sentiments and 
beliefs, and in this instance they clearly do ; 
so that I propose in the first place to speak of 
the great disappointments which this war and 
the second war in the Balkans have brought to 
thoughtful Americans and to all persons, indeed, 
who hoped that the human race was making 
some progress toward humane, just, and merci- 
ful conditions of life. 

We have been startled by the outbreak, the 
apparently sudden outbreak, of the worst fight- 
ing that the world has ever seen in regard to 
.destruction of life and property, and of pre- 
cious treasures of letters and art. That is the 
literal fact. No war of former times has been 
so destructive of things that we imagined the 
human race in its civilized parts held to be pre- 
cious and inviolable. 

Then, most Americans believed that one of 

1 An address before the Businesswomen's Club of Boston, 
October 15, 1914. 



98 TEE ROAD TOWARD PEACE 

the chief methods of progress in civilization 
■was expressed in the phrase, " the sanctity of 
contracts." You are all business women. You 
have known that modern business absolutely 
depends on the sanctity of contracts. It de- 
pends also upon the faith of man in man. All 
the commercial and financial agencies of the 
modern world are built on credit ; and what is 
credit but the faith of man in man that all will 
observe the sanctity of a contract or agree- 
ment? 

Lately, we saw in the Balkans that a bond 
of union, under which a considerable war had 
been fought against an alien ruler, suddenly 
broke to pieces ; and on the rupture came one 
of the most ferocious wars that the world has 
ever seen, a war as savage as that of the Greek 
revolution of 1822, which at the time was sup- 
posed to be characterized by unusual ferocity. 
And then we were brought to this sudden out- 
burst of warlike fury in Europe ; and one of the 
most civilized nations in Europe immediately 
declared by its acts — not in words, though a 
declaration in words was not altogether lacking 
— that a solemn treaty, only a few years old, 
was to signify for that nation nothing whatever, 
absolutely nothing. The treaty of neutrality 



AMERICA'S GRIEFS, DUTIES, AND DEBTS 99 

■wMch protected Belgium was violated in the 
first moments of the war. These things have 
brought to Americans a desperate disappoint- 
ment. 

The whole structure of our government rests 
on a single contract entered into by thirteen 
parties, the Constitution of the United States. 
We are thoroughly accustomed to the principle 
of federation, the joining together of distinct 
independent States in a common union for 
common purposes ; and we regard that union, 
that federation, as the very foundation of our 
national life. Are such contracts, such conven- 
tions, such agreements, to be regarded in Eu- 
rope as of no effect, as " pieces of paper," as 
the German Chancellor said, to be torn up be- 
cause of what he called military necessity, 
which only meant that a nation going to war 
may take the easiest, shortest, quickest way of 
attacking its opponent, no matter what neutral 
territory may stand in the way ? This total dis- 
regard of the sanctity of a contract is the heavi- 
est of our many serious disappointments within 
the last two months and a half. 

And then we Americans had fondly hoped 
that the conception of chivalry was to be pre- 
served in the modern world, that the chival- 



100 THE EOAD TOWARD PEACE 

rous man was still to exist, that a chivalrous 
knighthood might continue to exist, that the 
chivalrous principle of the strong defending 
and protecting the weak would develop, not 
dwindle, in the civilized world. Americans il- 
lustrate this state of mind, this chivalrous habit, 
in their treatment of women and children ; and 
they have done so for many generations. Sud- 
denly we find a strong nation which claims the 
highest degree of civilization absolutely disre- 
garding all considerations of chivalrous action 
towards weaker powers. The attack by Ger^ 
many on Belgium was a violent attack of a 
sudden on an army and a nation that was infi- 
nitely weaker than Germany, — no comparison 
whatever between little Belgium and great 
Germany in any sort of power or force j and 
to-day Belgium has been devoured, is extinct, 
if Europe shall permit her to be extinguished. 

We had hoped that the methods of war and 
the ethics of war had been shown to be capable 
of amelioration, of improvement. Both Confer- 
ences of the Hague labored much over amelio- 
rations of the practices in war. This present 
war has blown all those efforts to the winds. 

Americans, as a rule, have believed that the 
human race was really making a slow progress 



AMERICA'S GBIEFS, DUTIES, AND DEBTS 101 

toward justice between man and man, and be- 
tween nation and nation, and was making a 
slow progress toward the development of indi- 
vidual liberty. We said in our Declaration of 
Independence that all men are entitled to "life, 
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness " ; and 
now we see that there is not a man or woman 
in Europe that has any title to life, or liberty, 
or the pursuit of happiness. This is another 
heavy disappointment to the American people. 

We had hoped that the world was making 
some J)rogress toward the Christian ideal of 
mercy, gentleness, and love as the supreme mo- 
tives in human conduct ; and suddenly we dis- 
cover that in the most advanced nation in 
Europe as regards science, pure and applied, 
there is during war no mercy, no humanity, 
and that hatred quickly takes the place of 
friendliness, and is developed with an astonish- 
ing speed and amplitude into a fierce and abid- 
ing passion. 

These disappointments weigh upon us the 
more because we see no issue possible of the 
present struggle except after long months or 
years of desperate warfare. The prevailing Ger- 
man philosophy of government and of national 
greatness is built upon the dogma — " Might 



102 THE ROAD TOWABD PEACE m 

makes Riglit." It seems to be a new religion 
among the leading Prussians that force is the 
only basis of national greatness and of moral 
dignity, and valor the highest virtue, no matter 
in what cause valor is displayed. 

You are all women. Do you believe that 
might makes right? Have you ever believed 
it ? Has the history of the human race, up from 
savagery to what we call civilization, suggested 
to you that might is the real source of right, 
is the only foundation of just relations between 
man and woman? In savage life the greater 
strength, power, and endurance of the man 
gives him absolute control over the woman; 
and he has always exercised it. Here in this 
most fortunate and blessed country we have 
had a totally different conception of right rela- 
tions between man and woman, between adults 
and children, between the state and its citizens. 
We absolutely deny that might makes right. 
We believe that the foundations of the family 
and of the state are mOral, and that these moral 
foundations have superseded in some measure 
the ancient tenet that the strong have the right 
to dominate the weak. 

You perceive that the American objection 
to the political philosophy of Germany at the 



AMERICA'S GRIEFS, DUTIES, AND DEBTS 103 

present day, and to its militarism, is absolutely 
fundamental. Our objections go to the roots of 
the matter, and we are irreconcilable to the 
whole philosophy which prevails in Germany, 
apparently without denial or exception in any 
class of society. I say "apparently," because 
none of us feel that at present we have access 
to the fundamental sentiments of the mass of 
the German population. We have access to the 
expressed views of the philosophers, poets, and 
historians. We, of course, have access to the 
expressed views of their military authorities, ac- 
tive or retired. We have access to the archaic 
conceptions which the German Emperor cher- 
ishes of his function, and of the God-given 
powers of himself and his family. But we have 
not access at this moment to the underlying 
sentiments of the masses of the German peo- 
ple ; and it will probably be years before we 
learn them. So, thinking of these things, we 
have to qualify our use of the word " prevail " 
with the word " apparently," or the phrase " so 
far as we can see " ; and we are permitted to 
hope that we do not see far enough. 

Such being the gulf between American sen- 
timents and German sentiments as they appear 
to-day, and this gulf being a matter of political 



104 THE ROAD TOWARD PEACE 

and religious conviction, how are our duties as 
a nation to be determined in the present crisis 
and catastrophe for mankind? 

We have no difficulty in recognizing the jus- 
tice, indeed the indispensable quality of the 
action of our Government, the official action of 
the nation, in the present horrible conditions. 
We all believe that our Government has been 
right in declaring neutrality in the actual com- 
bat for the United States. We all believe that 
at present we must deal equally with the com- 
batants on the two sides — that if we sell food 
to one group, we must also sell food to the 
other ; that we must pay our debts, no matter 
to which side. So much we are doing. We are 
paying our debts, no matter whether the debt 
is due to a German, an Austrian, a Frenchman, 
or an Englishman. We also keep open the lines 
of traffic, whether those lines run into English or 
French ports, or into any other port of Europe 
not blockaded. Our surplus food is going to all 
the combatants at this moment ; because neutral 
ports give access to Germany and Austria as 
well as to England, France, and Russia. 

But this neutrality is official or legal, as it 
were. It must be maintained until new con- 
ditions determine new actions. But it is, of 



AMERICA'S GRIEFS, DUTIES, AND DEBTS 105 

course, quite impossible for us to be neutral as 
regards our feelings and beliefs, our sentiments 
and hopes ; quite impossible, because the cause 
in which Germany and Austria-Hungary are 
fighting is the cause of imperialism, of militar- 
ism, of governments by force, using against 
other nations the extreme of skilfully directed, 
highly trained force. We see upon the other 
side the two freest large nations in Europe 
combined with a military empire. These two 
freest nations — England and France — are na- 
tions to which we of this country are deeply 
indebted for our own safety, freedom, and faith 
in liberty under law. Therefore, neutrality in 
our hearts is quite out of the question. 

But under these conditions what can we do, 
what can you do to help agonized Europe? 
You can do everything in your power, and ad-' 
vise all persons over whom you have influence, 
to do everything in their power to keep our 
own industries going, to maintain the business, 
the work, the productiveness of this country; 
to restore the lines of exchange suddenly rup- 
tured after a careful building up which has 
taken at least three centuries ; and to restore 
the lines of transportation for the international 
exchange of goods. You can do everything in 



106 THE BOAD TOWABD PEACE 

your power to prevent all kinds of hoarding 
"within our country, within our domestic circles, 
hoarding of money, goods, or provisions — 
flour, for example, and sugar — and of pur- 
chasing beyond the usual demands of the fam- 
ily. All these things hurt. They hurt because 
they tend to an unreasonable rise of prices im- 
mediately, and on the spot. Discourage all such 
selfish precautions. 

Every man who employs other persons should 
now continue to employ as many as possible of 
the people he has been accustomed to employ. 
To reduce unnecessarily expenditures on the 
employment of labor is an unwise and unpatri- 
otic thing at this moment. 

Are there no expenditures that we may prop- 
erly reduce ? Certainly there are. But at this 
moment I think of only one class of expendi- 
tures which might well be reduced, namely, ex- 
penditures on luxuries, particularly on luxuries 
which are, to say the least, silly or injurious. 
There are a good many such luxuries in the 
American community on which serious savings 
might be made; but those are the only ex- 
penditures which it is even justifiable to reduce 
at this time, unless the money to meet normal 
expenditures is actually lacking. No fear of 



AMERICA'S GBIEFS, DUTIES, AND DEBTS 107 

future loss of income justifies retrenchment 
now. 

I have been speaking of our own expendi- 
tures and the employment of labor in our own 
country; but can we not do something for 
other countries in similar directions ? We can 
continue to supply to the utmost the industries 
of all other countries, and particularly the in- 
dustries of the European countries, with the 
raw materials they need for their own factories. 
We shall be truly neutral in so doing, if the 
conditions permit us to supply the raw mate- 
rials of their industries, or parts of them, to all 
the combatants. We may not be able to serve 
all the nations that are at war ; but should do 
it so far as it is possible. This is one of the 
neutral duties. 

The prospect is that the war will last until 
one or other of the combatants is thoroughly 
exhausted. One cannot conceive of Germany 
submitting to defeat until she has exhausted 
her supplies of men, money, and food. And I 
am sure we shall have equal difficulty in con- 
ceiving that England will stop until she is 
thoroughly exhausted. Fortunately, from our 
point of view, there is no more resolute or 
dogged people in the world than the English, 



108 THE BOAT) TOWARD PEACE 

and we remember in that connection with satis- 
faction that many of us are of English extrac- 
tion. 

As to France — a new thrill of feeling and 
sentiment has gone through France. Every one 
that returns from France says that the peo- 
ple seemed changed, externally and internally. 
They are sober and serious, and they go about 
their daily work with a grave determination to 
prevent by any sacrifices the extinction, or the 
reduction in power, of the French nation. 

But what shall I say of Eussia ? It is the 
momentary, yes, the rather permanent belief in 
Germany, that the Russians may be justly de- 
scribed as barbarians, semi -civilized people, 
Oriental people, incapable of that high degree 
of organization, and that practice of individual 
liberty under law which characterize the prom- 
ising Occidental peoples. And it is true that 
the Russians are an immense mass of people 
only lately risen from the condition of serfs, 
and that they are ruled by a despotic ruler who 
is surrounded by an autocratic group of high 
public officials. But we Americans have learnt 
in recent years a good deal about the Russians ; 
and we find in them some qualities which give 
us hope for the huge nation, which often seems 



AMERICA'S GRIEFS, DUTIES, AND DEBTS 109 

slumbering or half-awake as regards both com- 
mercial and political activity. We have had a 
large number of Russians poured in upon us 
of recent years, and vre have found them to 
be an industrious, intelligent, romantic people, 
capable of all the highest sentiments of human 
nature, and having at heart a great ambition 
toward liberty and an expanding and improv- 
ing life. I had occasion to observe while I was 
President of Harvard College that there were 
no more intelligent students in the University 
than the Russians. They had the defects of 
peoples that have been for generations under 
despotic rule, and doubtless on an immense 
scale they still exhibit those defects. 

Many Americans have made acquaintance 
within the last fifteen years with modern Rus- 
sian literature. It is in high degree imaginative, 
hopeful, and pathetic, though often revolution- 
ary in the proper sense of that word — that is, 
looking to great changes in family and social 
life, and in the life of the Government. Tolstoy 
represents an immense movement of the Rus- 
sian mind. It was the Czar of Russia that called 
the first Hague Conference. The Czar insti- 
tuted the Douma, which has had already an inter- 
esting and truly remarkable career, considering 



110 TEE ROAD TOWARD PEACE 

that none of its members had any experience 
of political liberty. I admit that none of these 
things may go very deep, except the Russian 
literature. That goes deep into the heart and 
mind of the nation. That makes a deep impres- 
sion on the heart and mind of the whole civil- 
ized world. 

We have further to observe that three im- 
portant steps have already been taken by Russia 
since this war broke out, all of them of a highly 
progressive nature. One is the offer to the Poles 
to reconstitute the Kingdom of Poland; an- 
other is to give Jews full civic rights in Russia ; 
and the third is the imperial order prohibiting 
the manufacture and use of the strong alcoholic 
spirit that the Russians have been in the habit 
of drinking. That last outcome of this sudden 
war is a very striking one. What if an immense 
temperance reform should date from August, 
1914, all over Russia? 

We must not, therefore, accept the German 
view that this war is really waged to resist a 
new irruption of the barbarians into Europe. It 
is more than doubtful whether the Russians are 
barbarians. It is more than doubtful whether 
the spirit in which the Russians are now fight- 
ing be not more accordant with the American 



AMERICA'S GBIEFS, DUTIES, AND DEBTS 111 

spirit than the spirit which animates the Ger- 
man Empire. 

We must bear in mind — indeed, we are not 
in danger of forgetting — the deep obligations 
which this American nation lies under to Eng- 
land and France. The obligations are so deep 
that it is quite in vain to expect us to be in our 
hearts neutral during the development of this 
fearful catastrophe. The American people is 
ordinarily accused of being materialistic, of 
seeking the dollar, and not caring much about 
anything else, except the luxuries or comforts 
that the dollar can buy. How often we have 
heard that of late. It is a total misconception 
with regard to the f undamantal beliefs and prac- 
tices of the American people. We are an ideal- 
istic people. When our ideals are attacked and 
seem to us to be in danger, there is no people 
in the world that more promptly throws to the 
winds all material interests. When our ideals 
are seriously attacked, we are absolutely reck- 
less with regard to our property, national or in- 
dividual, and we care for our material resources 
only as means of defending our moral theories 
and our hopes for mankind. 

We must hope and pray that we shall not be 
drawn into this most horrible war of all time. 



112 THE ROAD TOWARD PEACE 

But that escape will be due to the fact that 
Russia, England, and France have succeeded in 
defeating Germany and Austria-Hungary. 

Prophecy as to issues is impossible under such 
conditions as those we are now witnessing; but it 
is not impossible to prophesy that the American 
people will be true to their quality, true to their 
history, true to their obHgations to England 
and to France. We all know that the American 
ideals came from England across the Atlantic 
with the Pilgrim Fathers and the Puritans, and 
have since moved majestically across the conti- 
nent; and we all know that that "celestial- 
infernal phenomenon," as Carlyle called the 
French Revolution, carried all about the civil- 
ized and half -civilized world the fundamental 
conceptions concerning the rights of man, and 
the uplifting power of liberty. The French na- 
tion, after that " celestial-infernal phenome- 
non," wandered in the wilderness for more than 
two generations ; but at last they have attained 
to a republican form of government, which has 
already lasted more than forty years. Can we 
think of giving no aid to France if she comes 
to the end of her resources ? Can we think of 
bringing no aid to England if she be reduced 
to like straits ? Happily we do not need to an- 



AMERICA'S GBIEFS, DUTIES, AND DEBTS 113 

ticlpate so direful an issue. But let us not 
confuse our minds and wills by failing to see 
whither the German policies lead, whither the 
teachings of Bismarck, Treitschke, and Bern- 
hardi have led Germany. Let us not dream of 
abandoning our faith that human relations 
should be, nay, shall be, determined, not by 
arrogant force, but by considerations of justice, 
mercy, love, and good-will. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE CAUSES OF THE WAR ARE AUTOCRATIC 
INSTITUTIONS, NATIONAL DESIRES FOR EM- 
PIRE, DISREGARD FOR TREATIES AND CON- 
VENTIONS, AND FALSE PHILOSOPHIES WHY 

GERMANY MUST BE DEFEATED^ 

Each one of the principal combatants in Eu- 
rope seems to be anxious to prove that it is not 
responsible for this cruelest, most extensive, and 
mostdestructiveof all wars. Each Government in- 
volved has published the correspondence between 
its chief executive and other chief executives, 
and between its Chancellery or Foreign Of&ce 
and the equivalent bodies in the other nations 
that have gone to war, and has been at pains to 
give a wide circulation to these documents. To 
be sure, none of these Government publications 
seems to be absolutely complete. There seem to 
be in all of them suppressions or omissions 
which only the future historian will be able to 
report — perhaps after many years. They re- 
veal, however, the dilapidated state of the Con- 

^ A letter published in the New York Times on November 
17, 1914. 



THE CAUSE OF THE WAR — ITS OUTCOME 115 

cert of Europe in July, 1914, and the flurry in 
the European Chancelleries which the ultimatum 
sent by Austria-Hungary to Servia produced. 
They also testify to the existence of a new and 
influential public opinion about war and peace, 
to which nations that go to war think it desir- 
able to appeal for justification or moral sup- 
port. 

These publications have been read with in- 
tense interest by impartial observers in all parts 
of the world, and have in many cases determined 
the direction of the readers' sympathy and 
good-will ; and yet none of them discloses or 
deals with the real sources of the unprecedented 
calamity. They relate chiefly to the question 
who struck the match, and not to the questions 
who provided the magazine that exploded, and 
why did he provide it. Grave responsibility, of 
course, attaches to the person who gives the 
order to mobilize a national army or to invade 
a neighbor's territory ; but the real source of 
the resulting horrors is not in such an order, 
but in the governmental institutions, political 
philosophy, and long-nurtured passions and pur- 
poses of the nation or nations concerned. 

The prime source of the present immense 
disaster in Europe is the desire on the part 



116 THE ROAD TOWARD PEACE 

of Germany for world-empire, a desire which 
one European nation after another has made 
its supreme motive, and none that has once 
adopted it has ever completely eradicated. Ger- 
many arrived late at this desire, being pre- 
vented until 1870 from indulging in it, be- 
cause of her lack of unity, or rather because 
of being divided since the Thirty Years' War 
into a large number of separate, more or less in- 
dependent states. When this disease, which has 
attacked one nation after another through all 
historic times, struck Germany, it exhibited 
in her case a remarkable malignity, moving 
her to expansion in Europe by force of arms, 
and to the seizure of areas for colonization in 
many parts of the world. Prussia, indeed, had 
long believed in making her way in Europe by 
fighting, and had repeatedly acted on that be- 
lief. Shortly before the achievement of German 
unity by Bismarck, she had obtained by war in 
1864 and 1866 important accessions of terri- 
tory, and leadership in all Germany. 

With this desire for world-empire went the 
belief that it was only to be obtained by force 
of arms. Therefore, united Germany has labored 
with utmost intelligence and energy to prepare 
the most powerful army in the world, and to 



THE CAUSE OF THE WAR — ITS OUTCOME 117 

equip it for instant action in the most per- 
fect manner which science and eager foresight 
could contrive. To develop this supreme mihtary 
machine universal conscription — an outgrowth 
of the conception of the citizens' army of France 
during the Revolution — was necessary ; so 
that every young man in Germany physically 
competent to bear arms might receive the train- 
ing of a soldier, whether he wished it or not, 
and remain at the call of the Government for 
military duty during all his years of competency, 
even if he were the only son of a widow, or a 
widower with little children, or the sole sup- 
port of a family or other dependents. In order 
to the completeness of this military ideal the 
army became the nation and the nation became 
the army to a degree which had never before 
been realized in either the savage or the civilized 
world. This army could be summoned and put 
in play by the chief executive of the German 
nation with no preliminaries except the consent 
of the hereditary heads of the several states 
which united to form the Empire in 1870-71 
under the domination of Prussia, the Prussian 
King, become German Emperor, being com- 
mander-in-chief of the German army. At the 
word of the Emperor this army can be sum- 



118 THE ROAD TOWARD PEACE 

moned, collected, clothed, equipped and armed, 
and set in motion toward any frontier in a day. 
The German army was thus made the largest 
in proportion to population, the best equipped, 
and the most mobile in the world. The German 
General Staff studied incessantly and thoroughly 
plans for campaigns against all the other prin- 
cipal states of Europe, and promptly utilized — 
secretly, whenever secrecy was possible — all 
promising inventions in explosives, ordnance, 
munitions, transportation, and sanitation. At 
the opening of 1914 the General Staff believed 
that the German army was ready for war on the 
instant, and that it possessed some significant 
advantages in fighting — such as better imple- 
ments and better discipline — over the armies 
of the neighboring nations. The army could do 
its part toward the attainment of world-empire. 
It would prove invincible. 

The intense desire for colonies, and for the 
spread of German commerce throughout the 
world, instigated the creation of a great Ger- 
man navy, and started the race with England 
in navy building. The increase of German 
wealth, and the rapid development of manufac- 
tures and commercial sea-power after 1870-71, 
made it possible for the Empire to devote im- 



THE CAUSE OF THE WAB — ITS OUTCOME 119 

mense sums of money to the quick construction 
of a powerful navy, in which the experience and 
skill of all other shipbuilding nations would be 
appropriated and improved on. In thus push- 
ing her colonization and sea-power policy, Ger- 
many encountered the wide domination of Great 
Britain on the oceans ; and this encounter bred 
jealousy, suspicion, and distrust on both sides. 
That Germany should have been belated in the 
quest for foreign possessions was annoying ; but 
that England and France should early have 
acquired ample and rich territories on other 
continents, and then should resist or obstruct 
Germany when she aspired to make up for lost 
time, was intensely exasperating. Hence chronic 
resentments, and — when the day came — prob- 
ably war. In respect to its navy, however, 
Germany was not ready for war at the opening 
of 1914 ; and, therefore, she did not mean to 
get into war with Great Britain in that year. 
Indeed, she believed — on incorrect information 
— that England could not go to war in the 
summer of 1914. Neither the Government nor 
the educated class in Germany comprehends the 
peculiar features of party government as it ex- 
ists in England, France, and the United States ; 
and, therefore, the German leaders were sur- 



120 THE BOAD TOWARD PEACE 

prised and grievously disappointed at the sudden 
popular determination of Great Britain and Ire- 
land to lay aside party strife and take strenuous 
part in the general European conflict. 

The complete preparation of the German 
army for sudden war, the authority to make war 
always ready in the hands of the German Em- 
peror, and the thorough studies of the German 
Staff into the most advantageous plans of cam- 
paign against every neighbor, conspired to de- 
velop a new doctrine of " military necessity " 
as the all-sufficient excuse for disregarding and 
violating the contracts or agreements into which 
Prussia or the new Germany had entered with 
other nations. To gain quickly a military ad- 
vantage in attacking a neighbor came to be 
regarded as proper ground for violating any or 
all international treaties and agreements, no 
matter how solemn and comprehensive, how 
old or how new. The demonstration of the 
insignificance or worthlessness of international 
agreements in German thought and practice 
was given in the first days of the war by the 
invasion of Belgium, and has been continued 
ever since by violation on the part of Germany 
of numerous agreements concerning the con- 
duct of war into which Germany entered with 



THE CAUSE OF THE WAB — ITS OUTCOME 121 

many other nations at the Second Hague Con- 
ference. 

This German view of the worthlessness of 
international agreements was not a cause of 
the present war, because it was not fully evi- 
dent to Europe, although familiar and of long 
standing in Germany ; but it is a potent reason 
for the continuance of the war by the Allies 
until Germany is defeated ; because it is plain 
to all the nations of the world, except Ger- 
many, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey at the mo- 
ment, that the hopes of mankind for the gradual 
development of international order and peace 
rest on the sanctity of contracts between na- 
tions, and on the development of adequate 
sanctions in the administration of international 
law. The new doctrine of military necessity 
affronts all law, and is completely and hope- 
lessly barbarous. 

World-empire now, as always, is to be won 
by force — that is, by conquest and holding 
possession. So Assyria, Israel, Macedonia, Ath- 
ens, Rome, Islam, England, and France have 
successively believed and tried to accomplish 
in practice. United Germany has for forty 
years been putting into practice, at home and 
abroad, the doctrine of force as the source of 



122 THE ROAD TOWARD PEACE 

all personal and national greatness and all 
worthy human achievements. In the support 
of this doctrine, educated Germany has de- 
veloped and accepted the religion of valor and 
the dogma that Might makes Right. In so 
doing it has rejected with scorn the Christian 
teachings concerning humility and meekness, 
justice and mercy, brotherhood and love. The 
objects of its adoration have become Strength, 
Courage, and ruthless Will-Power ; let the 
weak perish and help them to perish ; let the 
gentle, meek, and humble submit to the harsh 
and proud ; let the shiftless and incapable die ; 
the world is for the strong, and the strongest 
shall be ruler. This is a religion capable of in- 
spiring its followers with zeal and sustained en- 
thusiasm in promoting the national welfare at 
whatever cost to the individual of life, liberty, 
or happiness, and also of lending a religious 
sanction to the extremes of cruelty, greed, and 
hate. It were incredible that educated people 
who have been brought up within earshot of 
Christian ethics and within sight of gentle 
men and women should all be content with the 
religion-of-valor plan. Accordingly, the finer 
German spirits have invented a supplement to 
that Stone Age religion. They have set up for 



TEE CAUSE OF THE WAR — ITS OUTCOME 123 

worship a mystical conception of the State as a 
majestic and beneficent entity which embraces 
all the noble activities of the nation and guides 
it to its best achievements. To this ideal State 
every German owes duty, obedience, and com- 
plete devotion. The trouble with this supple- 
ment to the religion of valor is that it dwells 
too much on submission, self-sacrifice, and dis- 
cipline, and not enough on individual liberty 
and self-control in liberty. Accordingly when 
the valiant men got control of the Government 
and carried the nation into a ferocious war, they 
swept away with them all the devotees of this 
romantic and spiritual State. The modern Ger- 
man is always a controlled, directed, and driUed 
person, who aspires to control and discipline his 
inferiors ; and in his view pretty much all man- 
kind are his inferiors. He is not a freeman in 
the French, English, or American sense ; and he 
prefers not to be. 

The present war is the inevitable result of 
lust of empire, autocratic government, sudden 
wealth, and the religion of valor. What Ger- 
man domination would mean to any that should 
resist it the experience of Belgium and North- 
ern France during the past three months aptly 
demonstrates. The civilized world can now see 



124 THE BOAB TOWARD PEACE 

where the new German morality — be efficient, 
be virile, be hard, be bloody, be rulers — would 
land it. To maintain that the power which has 
adopted in practice that new morality, and in 
accordance with its precepts promised Austria 
its support against Servia and invaded Belgium 
and France in hot haste, is not the responsible 
author of the European War, is to throw away 
memory, reason, and common sense in judging 
the human agencies in current events. 

The real cause of the war is this gradually 
developed barbaric state of the German mind 
and will. All other causes — such as the assas- 
sination of the heir to the throne of Austria- 
Hungary, the sympathy of Russia with the 
Balkan States, the French desire for the recov- 
ery of Alsace-Lorraine, and Great Britain's jeal- 
ousy of German aggrandizement — are secondary 
and incidental causes, contributory, indeed, but 
not primary and fundamental. If any one ask 
who brought the ruling class in Germany to 
this barbaric frame of mind, the answer must 
be Bismarck, Moltke, Treitschke, Nietzsche, 
Bernhardi, the German Emperor, their like, 
their disciples, and the military caste. 

Many German apologists for the war attribute 
it to German fear of Eussia. They say that, al- 



I THE CAUSE OF THE WAB — ITS OUTCOME 125 

though Germany committed the first actual 
aggression by invading Belgium and Luxem- 
burg on the way to attack France with the 
utmost speed and fierceness, the war is really a 
war of defense against Russia, which might 
desirably pass over, after France has been 
crushed, into a war against Great Britain, that 
perfidious and insolent obstacle to Germany's 
world-empire. The answer to this explanation 
is that, as a matter of fact, Germany has never 
dreaded, or even respected, the military strength 
of Russia, and that the recent wars and threat- 
enings of war by Germany have not been di- 
rected against Russia, but against Denmark, 
Austria, France, and England. In her coloni- 
zation enterprises it is not Russia that Ger- 
many has encountered, but England, France, 
and the United States. The friendly advances 
made within the last twenty years by Germany 
to Turkey were not intended primarily to 
strengthen Germany against Russia, but Ger- 
many against Great Britain through access by 
land to British India. In short, Germany's 
policies, at home and abroad, during the past 
forty years have been inspired not by fear of 
Russia, or of any other invader, but by its own 
aggressive ambition for world-empire. In the 



126 THE BO AD TOWARD PEACE 

present war it thinks it has staked its all on 
" empire or downfall." 

Those nations which value public liberty, and 
believe that the primary object of government 
is to promote the general welfare by measures 
and policies founded on justice, good-will, and 
respect for the freedom of the individual, can- 
not but hope that Germany will be completely 
defeated in its present undertakings ; but they 
do not believe that Germany is compelled to 
choose between a life of domination in Europe 
and the world and national death. They wish 
that all her humane culture and her genius for 
patient and exact research may survive this hid- 
eous war, and guide another Germany to great 
achievements for humanity. 

If the causes of the present immense catas- 
trophe have been correctly stated, the desirable 
outcomes of the war are, no world-empire for 
any race or nation, no more ^^ subjects," no ex- 
ecutives, either permanent or temporary, with 
power to throw their fellow-countrymen into 
war, no secret diplomacy justifying the use for 
a profit of all the lies, concealments, deceptions, 
and ambuscades which are an inevitable part of 
war, and assuming to commit nations on inter- 
national questions, and no conscription armies 



THE CAUSE OF THE WAR — ITS OUTCOME 127 

that can be launched in war by executives with- 
out consulting independent representative as- 
semblies. There should come out from this su- 
preme convulsion a federated Europe, or a 
league of the freer nations, which should secure 
the smaller states against attack, prevent the 
larger from attempting domination, make sure 
that treaties and other international contracts 
shall be public and be respected until modi- 
fied by mutual consent, and provide a safe 
basis for the limitation and reduction of arma- 
ments on land and sea, no basis to be consid- 
ered safe which could fail to secure the liberties 
of each and all the federated states against the 
attacks of any outsider or faithless member. 
No one can see at present how such a consum- 
mation is to be brought about, but any one can 
see already that this consummation is the only 
one which can satisfy the lovers of liberty un- 
der law, and the believers in the progress of 
mankind through loving service each to all and 
all to each. 

Extreme pacifists shrink from fighting evil 
with evil, hell with hell, and advise submission 
to outrage, or at least taking the risk of being 
forced into resigned submission. The believers 
in the religion of valor, on the other hand, pro- 



128 THE ROAD TOWABD PEACE - 

claim that war is a good thing in itself, that it 
develops the best human virtues, invigorates a 
nation become flaccid through ease and luxury, 
and puts in command the strong, dominating 
spirit of a valid nation or race. What is the 
just mean between these two extremes ? Is it 
not that war is always a hideous and hateful 
evil, but that a nation may sometimes find it to 
be the least of two evils between which it has 
to choose ? The justifiable and indeed necessary 
war is the war against the ravager and destroyer, 
the enemy of liberty, the claimant of world-em- 
pire. More and more the thinkers of the world 
see, and the common people more and more be- 
lieve instinctively, that the cause of righteous 
liberty is the cause of civilization. In the con- 
ference which will one day meet to settle the 
terms of peace, and therefore the future con- 
ditions of life in Europe, the example of the 
American Republic in regard to armaments and 
war, the publicity of treaties, and public liberty, 
security, and prosperity may reasonably have 
some influence. 



CHAPTER X 

CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN CHARLES W. ELIOT 
AND JACOB H. SCHIFF ABOUT THE WAR, BE- 
TWEEN NOVEMBER 24 AND DECEMBER 14, 1914 

Cambridge, Mass., 

November 24, 1914. 

Dear Mr. Sohiff : — 

It was a great relief to me to read just now 
your interview in the New York Times of No- 
vember 22, for I have been afraid that your 
judgment and mine, concerning the desirable 
outcome of this horrible war, were very dif- 
ferent. I now find that at many points they 
coincide. 

One of my strongest hopes is that one result 
of the war may be the acceptance by the lead- 
ing nations of the world of the precept or law 
— there shall be no world-empire for any single 
nation. If I understand you correctly, you hold 
the same opinion. You wish neither Germany 
nor England to possess world-empire. You also 
look forward, as I do, to some contract or agree- 
ment among the leading nations which shall 
prevent competitive armaments. I entirely agree 



130 THE BOAD TOWARD PEACE 

"with you that it is in the highest degree unde- 
sirable that this war should be prolonged to the 
exhaustion of either side. 

When, however, I come to your discussion 
of the means by which a good result toward 
European order and peace may be brought out 
of the present convulsion, I do not find clear 
guidance to present action on your part or 
mine, or on the part of our Government and 
people. Was it your thought that a congress of 
the peoples of North and South America should 
now be convened to bring to bear American 
opinion on the actual combatants while the war 
is going on? Or is it your thought that the 
American nations wait until there is a lull or 
pause in the indecisive fighting ? 

So far as I can judge from the very imperfect 
information which reaches us from Germany, 
the confidence of the German Emperor and 
people in their " invincible " army is not much 
abated, although it clearly ought to be. It 
is obvious that American opinion has some 
weight in Germany ; but has it enough weight 
to induce Germany to abandon her intense de- 
sire for Belgium and Holland and extensive 
colonial possessions ? To my thinking, without 
the abandonment of that desire and ambition 



COBBESPONDENCE WITH MB. SCHIFF 131 

on the part of Germany, there can be no lasting 

peace in Europe and no reduction of armaments. 

Sincerely yours, 

Chables W. Eliot. 



New Yokk, 

November 25, 1914. 

My dear Dr. Eliot : — 

I am just in receipt of your thoughtful letter 
of yesterday, which it has given me genuine 
pleasure to receive. While it is true that I have 
not found myself in accord with many of the 
views to which you have given public expression 
concerning the responsibility for this deplorable 
conflict, and the unfortunate conditions it has 
created, I never doubted that as to its desir- 
able outcome we would find ourselves in accord, 
and I am very glad to have this confirmed by 
you, though as to this, our views could not 
have diverged. 

As to the means by which a desirable re- 
sult toward European order and peace may be 
brought about out of the chaos which has be- 
come created, it is, I confess, difficult to give 
guidance at present. What needs first, in my 
opinion, to be done, is to bring forth a healthy 
and insistent public opinion here for an early 



132 THE ROAD TOWARD PEACE 

peace without either side becoming first ex- 
hausted, and it was my purpose in the inter- 
view I have given, to set the American people 
thinking concerning this. I have no idea that 
I shall have immediate success, but if men like 
you and others follow in the same line, I am sure 
American public opinion can before long be made 
to express itself emphatically and insistently in 
favor of an early peace. Without this, it is not 
unlikely that this horrible slaughter and destruc- 
tion may continue for a very, very long time. , 
Yours most faithfully, 

Jacob H. Schifp. 



Cambkidge, Mass., 

November 28, 1914. 

Dear Mr. Schiff : — 

I think, just as you do, that the thing which 
most needs to be done is to induce Germany 
to modify its present opinion that the nation 
must fight for its very life to its last mark, and 
the last drop of its blood. Now, every private 
letter that I have received from Germany, and 
every printed circular, pamphlet, or book on 
the war which has come to me from German 
sources, insists on the view that, for Germany, 
it is a question between world-empire or utter 



COBBESPONDENCE WITH MB. SCEIFF 133 

downfall. There is no sense or reason in this 
view, but the German philosophers, historians, 
and statesmen are all maintaining it at this 
moment. 

England, France, and Russia have no such 
expectations or desires as regards the fate of 
Germany. What they propose to do is to put a 
stop to Germany's plan of attaining world-em- 
pire by militarism. Have you any means of 
getting into the minds of some of the present 
rulers of Germany the idea that no such alter- 
native as life or death is presented to Germany in 
this war, and that the people need only abandon 
their world-empire ambitions, while securing 
safety in the heart of Europe and a chance to 
develop all that is good in German civilization ? 
Sincerely yours, 

Charles W. Eliot. 

The Greenbrier, 
White Sulphur Springs, 
West Virginia. 
December 1, 191i. 

Dear Dr. Eliot : — 

I have received to-day your letter of the 
28th ult., and I hasten to reply to it ; for I 
know of nought that is of more importance 
than the discussion between earnest men of 



134 THE BOAD TOWARD PEACE 

what might be done to bring to cessation this 
horrible and senseless war. 

I beheve you are mistaken — though in this 
I am stating nothing, absolutely, but my per- 
sonal opinion — that Germany would not listen 
to the suggestion for a restoration of peace until 
it has either come into a position to dictate the 
terms, or until it is utterly crushed. Indeed; I 
rather feel, and I have indications that such is 
the case, that England is unwilling to stop short 
of crushing Germany, and it is now using all 
the influence it can bring to bear in this coun- 
try to prevent public opinion being aroused in 
favor of the stoppage of hostiHties and reestab- 
lishment of peace. 

The same mail which brought your letter this 
morning brought me also a letter from a leading 
semi-military man, whom I know by name, but 
not personally. It is so fine and timely, that 
I venture to enclose a copy for your perusal. 
Why would not you, and perhaps Dr. Andrew 
D. White, who — is it not a coincidence? — has 
likewise written me to-day on the subject of my 
recent Times interview, be the very men to carry 
out the suggestions made by my correspondent ? 

Perhaps no other two men in the entire 
country are so greatly looked up to by its peo- 



COBBESPONDENCE WITH MB. SCHIFF 135 

pie for guidance as you — in the first instance 
— and Dr. White. You could surely bestow no 
greater gift upon the entire civilized world than 
if now, in the evening of a life which has been 
of such great value to mankind, you would call 
around you a number of leading, earnest Amer- 
icans with the view of discussing and framing 
plans through which American public opinion 
could be crystallized and aroused to the point 
where it will insistently demand that these war- 
ring nations come together, and, with the expe- 
rience they have made to their great cost, make 
at least an attempt to find a way out. I cannot 
but believe that the Governments of England, 
France, and Germany — if not Russia — will 
have to listen, if the American people speak 
with no uncertain voice. Do it and you will de- 
serve and receive the blessing of this and of 
coming generations ! 

Yours most faithfully, 

Jacob H. Sohiff. 



Cambbidge, Mass., 

December 3, 1914. 

Deak Mr. Schiff: — 

I thank you for your letter of December 1 
and its interesting enclosure. 



136 THE ROAD TOWARD PEACE 

Although every thoughtful person must ear- 
nestly desire that the waste and destruction of 
this greatest of wars should be stopped as soon 
as possible, there is an overpowering feeling 
that the war should go on until all the com- 
batants, including Germany, have been brought 
to see that the governmental regime and the 
state of the public mind in Germany which have 
made this war possible are not consistent with 
the security and well-being of Europe in the 
future. 

Personally, I feel strongly that the war ought 
to go on so long as Germany persists in its 
policies of world-empire, dynastic rule, auto- 
cratic bureaucracy, and the use of force in in- 
ternational dealings. If the war stops before 
Germany sees that those policies cannot prevail 
in twentieth-century Europe, the horrible wrongs 
and evils which we are now witnessing will recur; 
and all the nations will have to continue the 
destructive process of competitive armaments. If 
peace should be made now, before the Allies have 
arrived at attacking Germany on her own soil, 
there would result only a truce of moderate 
length, and then a renewal of the present hor- 
rors. 

I cannot but think that Europe now has a 



COBBESPONDENCE WITH MB. SCHIFF 137 

chance to make a choice between the Grerman 
ideal of the State and the Anglo-American ideal. 
These two ideals are very different; and the 
present conflict shows that they cannot coexist 
longer in modern Europe. 

In regard to the suggestion which your cor- 
respondent made to you that a conference of 
private persons should now be called in the 
hope of arriving at an agreed-upon appeal to 
the combatants to desist from fighting and con- 
sider terms of settlement, I cannot but feel (1) 
that such a conference would have no assured 
status ; (2) that the combatants would not Hsten ; 
and (3) that the effort would, therefore, be un- 
timely now, though perhaps useful later. 

One idea might possibly bring about peace, 
if it fructified in the mind of the German Em- 
peror — the idea, namely, that the chance of 
Germany's obtaining dominating power in either 
Europe or the world having already gone, the 
wise thing for him to do is to save United Ger- 
many within her natural boundaries for secure 
development as a highly civilized, strong nation 
in the heart of Europe. Surplus population can 
always emigrate happily in the future as in the 
past. 

The security of Germany would rest, how- 



138 THE BOAB TOWARD PEACE 

ever, on an international agreement to be main- 
tained by an international force j whereas, the 
example which Germany has just given of the 
reckless violation of international agreements is 
extremely discouraging in regard to the possi- 
bility of securing the peace of Europe in the 
future. 

Although this war has already made quite im- 
possible the domination of Germany in Europe, 
or in the world, the leaders of Germany do not 
yet see or apprehend that impossibility. Hence, 
many earnest peace-seekers have to confess that 
they do not see any means whatever available 
for promoting peace in Europe now, or even 
procuring a short truce. 

I wish I could believe with you that the 
Governments of England, France, Germany, 
and Russia would listen to the voice of the 
American people. They all seem to desire the 
good opinion and moral support of America; 
but I see no signs that they would take Ameri- 
can advice, or imitate American example. Presi- 
dent Wilson seems to think that this country 
will be accepted as a kind of umpire in this for- 
midable contest ; but surely we have no right to 
any such position. Our example in avoiding 
aggression on other nations, and in declining 



COBBESPONBENCE WITH MB. SCHIFF 139 

to enter the contest for world-power, ought to 
have some effect in abating European ambitions 
in that direction ; but our exhortations to peace 
and good-will will, I fear, have little influence. 
There is still a real contest on between democ- 
racy and oligarchical methods. 

You see, my dear Mr. Schiff, that I regard 
this war as the result of long-continuing causes 
which have been gathering force for more than 
fifty years. In Germany, all the forces of educa- 
tion, finance, commercial development, a pagan 
philosophy, and government have been prepar- 
ing this war since 1860. To stop it now, before 
these forces have been overwhelmingly defeated, 
and before the whole German people is con- 
vinced that they are defeated, would be to leave 
humanity exposed to the certain recurrence of 
the fearful convulsion we are now witnessing. 

If anybody can show me any signs that the 
leaders of Germany are convinced that there is 
to be no world-empire for Germany or any other 
nation, and no despotic Government in Europe, 
I shall be ready to take part in any effectual 
advocacy of peace. 

Sincerely yours, 

Charles W. Eliot, 



140 THE ROAD TOWARD PEACE 

New York, 

December 6, 1914. 

Dear Dr. Eliot: — 

Your letter of December 3 reached me this 
morning, and has given me much food for 
thought. 

I wish I could follow you in the position you 
have taken; for I like nought better than to sit 
at the feet of a master like you and be in- 
structed. But, much as I have tried, even before 
our recent correspondence was begun, to get at 
your viewpoint as from time to time published, 
I have not been able to convince myself that 
you occupy a correct position. Please accept 
this as expressed in all modesty, for I know 
were you not thoroughly convinced of the jus- 
tice of the position you have taken from the 
start you would not be so determined in hold- 
ing to it. 

I am perfectly frank to say that I am amazed 
and chagrined when you say that you feel 
strongly that the war ought to go on until the 
Allies have arrived at attacking Germany on 
her own soil, which, if this is at all likely to 
come, may take many months yet and will mean 
sacrifice of human life on both sides more ap- 
palling than anything we have seen yet since 



COBBESPONDENCE WITH MB. SCHIFF 141 

the war began. So you are willing that, with all 
the human life that has already perished, prac- 
tically the entire flower of the warring nations 
shall become exterminated before even an effort 
be made to see whether these nations cannot be 
brought to reason, cannot be made to stop and 
to consider whether, with the experience of the 
past four months before them, it would not be 
better to even now make an effort to find a way 
in which the causes that have led to this deplor- 
able conflict can be once and forever eradi- 
cated ? 

That it will be possible to find at this time 
any method or basis through the adoption of 
which the world would become entirely immune 
against war I do not believe, even by the estab- 
lishment of the international poHce force such 
as you and others appear to have in mind. 

The perpetual cessation of all war between 
the civilized nations of the world can, as I see it, 
only be brought about in two ways, both Uto- 
pian and likely impracticable for many years to 
come. War could be made Qnly to cease entirely 
if all the nations of Europe could be organized 
into a United States of Europe and if free trade 
were established throughout the world. In the 
first instance, the extreme nationalism, which 



142 THE ROAD TOWARD PEACE 

has become so rampant during the past fifty 
years and which has been more or less at the 
bottom of every war, would then cease to exist 
and prevail, and in the second event, namely, 
if free trade became established throughout the 
world, the necessity for territorial expansion 
and aggression would no longer be needed, for, 
with the entire world open on equal terms to 
the commerce and industry of every nation, 
territorial possession would not be much of a 
consideration to any peoples. 

You continually lay stress upon the danger 
of the domination of Germany in Europe and 
in the world. I believe I have already made my- 
self quite clear in my recent New York Times 
interview, which has called forth this corre- 
spondence between us, that neither would I wish 
to have Germany come into a position where it 
might dominate Europe, and more or less the 
world, nor do I beHeve that the German na- 
tion, except perhaps a handful of extremists, 
has any such desires. 

I believe I have also made myself quite clear 
in the interview to which I have referred that 
my feelings are not anti-English, for I shall 
never forget that liberal government and all 
forms of liberalism have had their origin, ever 



COBBESPONDENCE WITH MB. SCHIFF 143 

since the Magna Charta, in that great nation 
whom we so often love to call our cousins. But 
with all of this, can you ignore the fact that 
England even to-day, without the further power 
and prestige victory in the present conflict 
would give her, practically dominates the high 
seas, that she treats the ocean as her own and 
enforces her dictates upon the waters even to 
our very shores ? That this is true the past four 
months have amply proved. 

I am not one of those who fear that the 
United States, as far as can now be foreseen, 
will get into any armed conflict with Great 
Britain or with Japan, her permanent ally, but 
I can well understand that many in our country 
are of a different opinion, and it takes no pro- 
phet to foresee that, with England coming out 
of this war victorious and her and Japan's 
power on the high seas increased, the demand 
from a large section of our people for the ac- 
quisition and possession by the United States of 
an increased powerful navy and for the erection 
of vast coast defenses, both on the Atlantic and 
Pacific shores, will become so insistent that it can- 
not be withstood. What this will mean to the 
American people in lavish expenditures and in in- 
creased taxation I need not here further go into. 



144 THE BOAD TOWARD PEACE 

Yes, my dear and revered friend, I can see 
nought but darkness if a way cannot be soon 
found out of the present deplorable situation as 
it exists in Europe. 

But even if the Allies are victorious, it will 
mean, as I am convinced, the beginning of the 
descent of England as the world's leader and the 
hastened ascendency of Russia, who, not to-day 
or to-morrow, but in times to come, is sure to 
crowd out England from the world's leadership. 
A Russia that will have become democratic in 
its government, be it as a republic or under a 
truly constitutional monarchy ; a Russia in which 
education will be as free as it is in our own 
country ; a Russia in which the people can move 
about and make homes in the vast territory she 
possesses wherever they can find most happi- 
ness and prosperity ; a Russia with its vast nat- 
ural resources of every kind fully developed, is 
bound to be the greatest and most powerful 
nation on the earth. 

But I am going too far into the future and I 
must return to the sad and deplorable present. 
I only wanted to show how England's alliance 
with this present-day Russia and its despotic, 
autocratic, and inhuman Government may, if 
the Allies shall be victorious, prove possibly in 



COBBESPONDJENCE WITH MB. SCHIFF 145 

the nearer future, but certainly in the long run, 
England's Nemesis. 

Before closing I want to correct the impres- 
sion you appear to have received that I have 
meant to suggest a conference of private per- 
sons for the purpose of agreeing upon an appeal 
by them to the nations of Europe to desist from 
fighting and [consider terms of settlement. I 
know this would be entirely impracticable and 
useless, but what I meant to convey to you was 
my conviction that if you and men like you, of 
whom I confess there are but too few, were to 
make the endeavor to rouse public opinion in 
the United States to a point where it should 
insistently demand that this terrible carnage of 
blood and destruction cease, it would not be 
long before these warring Governments would 
take notice of such sentiments on the part of 
the American people ; and what should be done 
at once is the stoppage of the furnishing of 
munitions of war to any of the belligerents, as 
is unfortunately done to so great an extent at 
present from this country. 

We freely and abundantly give to the Red 
Cross and the many other relief societies, but 
we do this, even if indirectly, out of the very 
profits we derive from the war material we sell 



146 THE ROAD TOWARD PEACE 

to the belligerents, and with which the wounds 
the Red Cross and other relief societies en- 
deavor to assuage are inflicted. 

Yours most faithfully, 

Jacob H. Schiff. 



Cambridge, Mass., 

December 8, 1914. 

Dear Mb. Schiff; — 

Your letter of December 5 tells me what the 
difference is between you and me in respect to 
the outcome of the war — I am much more 
hopeful or sanguine of the world's getting good 
out of it than you are. Since you do not hope 
to get any good to speak of out of it, you want 
to stop it as soon as possible. You look forward 
to future war from time to time between the 
nations of Europe and to the maintenance of 
competitive armaments. You think that the lust 
of dominion must continue to be felt and grat- 
ified, now by one nation and now by another ; 
that Great Britain can gratify it now, but that 
she will be overpowered by Russia by and by. 

I am unwilling to accept these conditions for 
Europe, or for the world, without urging the 
freer nations to make extraordinary efforts to 
reach a better solution of the European inter- 



CORRESPONDENCE WITH MR. SCHIFF 147 

national problem which, unsolved, has led down 
to this horrible pit of general war. 

I have just finished another letter to the 
JVew York Times, which will probably be in 
print by the time you get back to New York, 
so I will not trouble you with any exposition 
of the grounds of my hopefulness. It is be- 
cause I am hopeful that I want to see this war 
fought out until Germany is persuaded that she 
cannot dominate Europe, or, indeed, make her 
will prevail anywhere by force of arms. When 
that change of mind has been effected, I hope 
that Germany will become a member of a fed- 
eration firm enough and powerful enough to 
prevent any single nation from aiming at world- 
empire, or even pouncing on a smaller neighbor. 

There is another point on which I seem to 
differ from you : I do not believe that any single 
nation has now, or can ever hereafter have, the 
leadership of the world, whereas you look for- 
ward to the existence of such leadership or 
domination in the hands of a single great 
power. Are there not many signs already, both 
in the East and in the West, that the time 
has passed for world-empire ? 

Very sincerely and cordially yours, 

Charles W. Eliot. 



148 THE BOAD TOWARD PEACE 

New York, 

December 14, 1914. 

Dear Dr. Eliot : — 

I have delayed replying to your valued letter 
of the 8th inst. until after the appearance of 
your further letter to the I^ew York Times, to 
which you had made reference, and, like every- 
thing emanating from you, the contents of your 
last Times letter have evoked my deepest in- 
terest. 

Had our recent correspondence not already 
become more extended than you likely had in- 
tended it to become when you first wrote me on 
the subject of my Times interview of some 
weeks ago, I should go into your latest argu- 
ments at greater length. As it is, I shall only 
reiterate that I find myself unable to follow 
you in your belief and hope, that world-empire 
and world-leadership, as this now exists, is likely 
to cease as a consequence of the present war, 
much as we all may desire this. 

England has taken up arms to retain her 
world-dominion and leadership ; and to gain it, 
Germany is fighting. How can you, then, expect 
that England, if victorious, would be willing to 
surrender her control of the oceans and the do- 
minion over the trade of the world she possesses 



COBBESPONDENCE WITH MB. SCHIFF 149 

in consequence, and where is there, then, room 
for the hope you express that world-leadership 
may become a thing of the past with the term- 
ination of the present conflict ? ; 

I repeat, with all my attachment for my na- 
tive land and its people, I have no inimical 
feeling toward England, have warm sentiments 
for France, and the greatest compassion for 
brave, stricken Belgium. 

Thus, " with malice toward none," and with 
the highest respect for your expressed views, I 
am still of the opinion that there can be no 
greater service rendered to mankind than to 
make the effort, either through the force of the 
public opinion of the two Americas or other- 
wise, to bring these warring Governments to- 
gether at an early moment, even if this can 
only be done without stopping their conflict, so 
that they may make the endeavor, whether — 
with their costly experience of the last five 
months, with the probability that they now 
know better what need be done to make the 
extreme armaments on land and sea as unneces- 
sary as they are undesirable in the future — a 
basis cannot be found upon which disarmament 
can be effectively and permanently brought 
about. 



150 THE ROAD TOWARD PEACE 

This, at some time, they will have to come 
to, in any event, and must there first more hu- 
man lives be sacrificed into the hundreds and 
hundreds of thousands, and still greater havoc 
be wrought, before passions can be made to 
cease and reason be made to return ? 

If, as you seem to think, the war need go 
on until one country is beaten into a condi- 
tion where it must accept the terms the victor 
chooses to impose, because it can no longer 
help itself to do else, the peace thus obtained 
will only be the harbinger of another war in 
the near or distant future, bloodier proba- 
bly than the present sanguinary conflict, and 
through no compact which might be entered 
into will it be possible to actually prevent this. 

Twenty centuries ago Christianity came into 
the world with its lofty message of " peace on 
earth and good-will to men," and now, after 
two thousand years, and at the near approach 
of the season when Christianity celebrates the 
birth of its founder, it is insisted that the merci- 
less slaughter of man by man we have been 
witnessing these last months must be permitted 
to be continued into the infinite. 
Most faithfully yours, 

Jacob H. ScmFF. 



CHAPTER XI 

THE WAR AN UNPRECEDENTED CALAMITY, DUB 
TO AUTOCRACY, MILITARISM, SECRET BU- 
REAUCRACY, AND LUST OP EMPIRE SHALL 

IT BRING FORTH A COUNCIL OF EUROPE, AN 
INTERNATIONAL FORCE, ABOVE-BOARD DI- 
PLOMACY, AND REDUCTION OF ARMAMENTS ?* 

The great war has now been going on long 
enough to enable mankind to form approxi- 
mately correct views about its vast extent and 
scale of operations, its sudden interference with 
commerce and all other helpful international 
intercourse, its unprecedented wrecking of 
family happiness and continuity, its wiping out, 
as it proceeds, of the accumulated savings of 
many former generations in structures, objects 
of art, and industrial capital, and the huge bur- 
dens it is likely to impose on twentieth-century 
Europe. From all these points of view, it is 
evidently the most horrible calamity that has 
ever befallen the human race, and the most 
crucial trial to which civilization has been ex- 

1 A letter published in the Neva York Times December 11, 
1914. 



152 THE BOAD TOWARD PEACE 

posedo It is, and is to be, the gigantic struggle 
of these times between the forces which make 
for liberty and righteousness and those which 
make for the subjection of the individual man, 
the exaltation of the state, and the enthrone- 
ment of physical force directed by a ruthless 
collective will. It threatens a sweeping betrayal 
of the best hopes of mankind. 

Each of the nations involved, horrified at the 
immensity of the disaster, maintains that it is 
not responsible for the war ; and each Govern- 
ment has issued a statement to prove that some 
other Government is responsible for the out- 
break. This discussion, however, relates almost 
entirely to actions by monarchs and cabinets 
between July 23 and August 4 — a short period 
of hurried messages between the chancelleries 
of Europe — actions which only prove that the 
monarchs and ministers for foreign affairs could 
not, or at least did not, prevent the long-prepared 
general war from breaking out. The assassina- 
tion of the Archduke and Duchess of Hohen- 
berg, on the 28th of June, was in no proper 
sense a cause of the war, except as it was one 
of the consequences of the persistent aggres- 
sions of Austria-Hungary against her south- 
eastern neighbors. Neither was Russian mobil- 



SHALL THE WAR BRING LASTING PEACE? 153 

ization in four military districts on July 29 a 
cause of the war ; for that was only an external 
manifestation of the Russian state of mind to- 
ward the Balkan peoples, a state of mind well 
known to all publicists ever since the Treaty of 
Berlin in 1878. No more was the invasion of 
Belgium by the German army on August 4 a 
true cause of the war, or even the cause, as dis- 
tinguished from the occasion, of Great Britain's 
becoming involved in it. By that action, Ger- 
many was only taking the first step in carrying 
out a long-cherished purpose, and in executing 
a judicious plan of campaign prepared many 
years in advance. The artificial panic in Ger- 
many about its exposed position between two 
powerful enemies, France and Russia, was not 
a genuine cause of the war ; for the General 
Staff knew they had crushed France once, and 
were confident they could do it again in a month. 
As to Russia, it was, in their view, a huge na- 
tion, but very clumsy and dull in war. 

The real causes of the war are all of many 
years' standing; and all the nations now in- 
volved in the fearful catastrophe have contrib- 
uted to the development of one or more of these 
effective causes. The fundamental causes are: 
(1) The maintenance of monarchical Govern- 



164 THE ROAD TOWARD PEACE 

ments, each sanctioned and supported by the 
national religion, and each furnished with a 
cabinet selected by the monarch, — Govern- 
ments which can make war without any previ- 
ous consultation of the peoples through their 
elected representatives ; (2) the constant mainte- 
nance of conscript armies, through which the 
entire able-bodied male population is trained in 
youth for service in the army or navy, and re- 
mains subject to the instant call of the Gov- 
ernment till late in life, the officering of these 
permanent armies involving the creation of a 
large military class likely to become powerful in 
political, industrial, and social administration ; 
(3) the creation of a strong, permanent bureau- 
cracy within each nation for the management 
of both foreign and domestic affairs, much of 
whose work is kept secret from the public at 
large; and finally, (4) the habitual use of mili- 
tary and naval forces to acquire new territories, 
contiguous or detached, without regard to the 
wishes of the people annexed or controlled. This 
last cause of the war is the most potent of 
the four, since it is strong in itself, and is 
apt to include one or more of the other three. 
It is the gratification of the lust for world- 
empire. 



SHALL THE WAB BBINQ LASTING PEACE? 155 

Of all the nations taking part in the present 
war, Great Britain is the only one which does 
not maintain a conscript army ; hut, on the other 
hand. Great Britain is the earHest modern claim- 
ant of world-empire by force, with the single 
exception of Spain, which long since abandoned 
that quest. Every one of these nations except 
little Servia has yielded to the lust for empire. 
Every one has permitted its monarch or its 
cabinet to carry on secret negotiations liable at 
any time to commit the nation to war, or to fail 
in maintaining the peace of Europe or of the 
Near East. In the crowded diplomatic events of 
last July, no phenomenon is more striking than 
the exhibition of the power which the British 
people confide to the hands of their Foreign 
Secretary. In the interests of public liberty and 
public welfare no official should possess such 
powers as Sir Edward Grey used admirably — 
though in vain — last July. In all three of the 
empires engaged in the war there has long ex- 
isted a large military caste which exerts a strong 
influence on the Government and its policies, 
and on the daily life of the people. 

These being the real causes of the terrific 
convulsion now going on in Europe, it cannot 



156 THE BOAB TOWARD PEACH 

be questioned that the nation in which these 
complex causes have taken strongest and most 
complete effect during the last fifty years is 
Germany. Her form of government has been 
imperialistic and autocratic in the highest de- 
gree. She has developed with great intelligence 
and assiduity the most formidable conscript 
army in the world, and the most influential and 
insolent military caste. Three times since 1864 
she has waged war in Europe, and each time 
she has added to her territory without regard 
to the wishes of the annexed population. For 
twenty-five years she has exhibited a keen de- 
sire to obtain colonial possessions; and since 
1896 she has been aggressive in this field. In 
her schools and universities the children and 
youth have been taught for generations that 
Germany is surrounded by hostile peoples, that 
her expansion in Europe and in other continents 
is resisted by jealous powers which started ear- 
lier in the race for foreign possessions, and that 
the salvation of Germany has depended from 
the first, and will depend till the last, on the 
efficiency of her army and navy and the war- 
like spirit of her people. This instruction, given 
year after year by teachers, publicists, and 
rulers, was first generally accepted in Prussia, 



SHALL THE WAR BBING LASTING PEACE? 157 

but now seems to be accepted by the entire 
empire as unified in 1871. 

The attention of the civilized world was first 
called to this state of the German mind and 
will by the triumphant policies of Bismarck; but 
during the reign of the present Emperor the 
external aggressiveness of Germany and her 
passion for world-empire have grown to much 
more formidable proportions. Although the 
German Emperor has sometimes played the 
part of the peacemaker, he has habitually acted 
the war-lord in both speech and bearing, and 
has supported the military caste whenever it has 
been assailed. He is by inheritance, conviction, 
and practice a divine-right sovereign whose 
throne rests on an " invincible " army, an army 
conterminous with the nation. In the present 
tremendous struggle he carries his subjects with 
him in a rushing torrent of self-sacrificing patri- 
otism. Mass-fanaticism and infectious enthusi- 
asm seem to have deprived the leading class in 
Germany, for the moment, of all power to see, 
reason, and judge correctly — no new phenome- 
non in the world, but instructive in this case 
because it points to the grave defect in German 
education — the lack of liberty and, therefore, 
of practice in self-control. 



168 THE BOAD TOWABD PEACE 

The twentieth-century educated German is, 
however, by no means given over completely to 
material and physical aggrandizement and the 
worship of might. He cherishes a partly new 
conception of the state as a collective entity 
whose function is to develop and multiply, not 
the free, healthy, and happy individual man 
and woman, but higher and more effective types 
of humanity, made superior by a strenuous 
discipline which takes much account of the 
strong and ambitious, and Uttle of the weak or 
meek. He rejects the ethics of the Beatitudes 
as unsound, but accepts the religion of Valor, 
which exalts strength, courage, endurance, and 
the ready sacrifice by the individual of liberty, 
happiness, and life itself for Germany's honor 
and greatness. A nation of sixty millions hold- 
ing these philosophical and religious views, and 
proposing to act on them in winning by force 
the empire of the world, threatens civilization 
with more formidable irruptions of a destroy- 
ing host than any that history has recorded. 
The rush of the German army into Belgium, 
France, and Russia and its consequences to 
those lands have taught the rest of Europe to 
dread German domination, and — it is to be 
hoped — to make it impossible. 



SHALL THE WAR BRING LASTING PEACE? 159 

The real cause of the present convulsion is, 
then, the state of mind or temper of Germany, 
including her conception of national greatness, 
her theory of the State, and her intelligent and 
skilful use of all the forces of nineteenth-cen- 
tury applied science for the destructive pur- 
poses of war. It is, therefore, apparent that 
Europe can escape from the domination of 
Germany only by defeating her in her present 
undertakings; and that this defeat can be 
brought about only by using against her the 
same effective agencies of destruction and the 
same martial spirit on which Germany itself 
relies. Horrible as are the murderous and de- 
vastating effects of this war, there can be no 
lasting peace until Europe as a whole is ready 
to make some serious and far-reaching deci- 
sions in regard to governmental structures and 
powers. In all probability the sufferings and 
losses of this widespread war must go farther 
and cut deeper before Europe can be brought 
to the decisions which alone can give securities 
for lasting peace against Germany on the one 
hand and Russia on the other, or to either of 
these nations, or can give security for the fu- 
ture to any of the smaller nations of Continen- 
tal Europe. There can, indeed, be no security 



160 THE BOAD TOWABD PEACE 

for future peace in Europe until every Euro- 
pean nation recognizes the fact that there is to 
be no such thing in the world as one dominat- 
ing nation — no such thing as world-empire 
for any single nation — Great Britain, Ger- 
many, Russia, Japan, or China. There can be 
no sense of security against sudden invasion in 
Europe so long as all the able-bodied men are 
trained to be soldiers, and the best possible ar- 
mies are kept constantly ready for instant use. 
There can be no secure peace in Europe until 
a federation of the European states is estab- 
lished, capable of making public contracts in- 
tended to be kept, and backed by an over- 
whelming international force subject to the 
orders of an international tribunal. The pres- 
ent convulsion demonstrates the impotence 
toward permanent peace of secret negotiations, 
of unpublished agreements, of treaties and cov- 
enants that can be broken on grounds of mili- 
tary necessity, of international law if without 
sanctions, of pious wishes, of economic and 
biological predictions, and of public opinion 
unless expressed through a firm international 
agreement, behind which stands an interna- 
tional force. When that international force has 
been firmly established it will be time to con- 



SEALL THE WAR BEING LASTING PEACE? 161 

sider what proportionate reductions in national 
armaments can be prudently recommended. 
Until that glorious day dawns, no patriot and 
no lover of his kind can expect lasting peace in 
Europe or wisely advocate any reduction of 
armaments. 

The hate-breeding and worse than brutal 
cruelties and devastations of the war with their 
inevitable moral and physical degradations 
ought to shock mankind into attempting a 
great step forward. Europe and America should 
undertake to exterminate the real causes of the 
catastrophe. In studying that problem the com- 
ing European conference can profit by the ex- 
perience of the three prosperous and valid coun- 
tries in which public liberty and the principle 
of federation have been most successfully de- 
veloped — Switzerland, Great Britain, and the 
United States. Switzerland is a democratic fed- 
eration which unites in a firm federal bond 
three different racial stocks speaking three un- 
like languages, and divided locally and irreg- 
ularly between the Catholic Church and the 
Protestant. The so-called British Empire tends 
strongly to become a federation ; and the meth- 
ods of government both in Great Britain itself 
and in its affiliated commonwealths are becom- 



162 THE BO AD TOW ABB PEACE 

mg more and more democratic in substance. 
The war has brought this fact out in high re- 
lief. As to the United States, it is a strong fed- 
eration of forty-eight heterogeneous States 
which has been proving for a hundred years 
that freedom and democracy are safer and hap- 
pier for mankind than subjection to any sort 
of autocracy, and afford far the best training 
for national character and national efficiency. 
RepubKcan France has not yet had time to give 
this demonstration, being encumbered with 
many survivals of the Bourbon and Napoleonic 
regimes, and being forced to maintain a con- 
script army. 

It is an encouraging fact that every one of 
the political or governmental changes needed 
is already illustrated in the practice of one or 
more of the civilized nations. To exaggerate 
the necessary changes is to postpone or prevent 
a satisfactory outcome from the present calcu- 
lated destructions and wrongs and the accom- 
panying moral and religious chaos. Ardent 
proposals to remake the map of Europe, recon- 
struct European society, substitute republics 
for empires, and abolish armaments are in fact 
obstructing the road toward peace and good- 
will among men. That road is hard at best. 



SHALL THE WAR BEING LASTING PEACE? 163 

The immediate duty of the United States is 
presumably to prepare, on the basis of its pres- 
ent army and navy, to furnish an effective quota 
of the international force, servant of an inter- 
national tribunal, which will make the ultimate 
issue of this most abominable of wars, not a 
truce, but a durable peace. 

In the mean time, the American peoples cry 
with one voice to the German people, like 
Ezekiel to the House of Israel — "Turn ye, 
turn ye from your evil ways ; for why will ye 
die?" 



CHAPTER XII 

THE pilgrims' IDEALS A FREE CHURCH IN 

A FREE STATE IN 1620^ 

Recent events in Europe have satisfied many 
Americans that the essential difference between 
nations is a difference of ideals. Thus, the prin- 
cipal ideals of Germany are national efficiency 
through a forceful discipline, and domination 
over other peoples as the result of that effi- 
ciency, while the governmental or political ideals 
of Great Britain since Cromwell's Common- 
wealth have always contained a large element 
of public liberty and individual independence. 
The fundamental cause of the European war is 
the difference in the ideals of government, na- 
tional greatness, and national welfare of Ger- 
many and Austria on the one hand, and France 
and Great Britain on the other. The principal 
difference between the people of the United 
States and the nations of Europe is a difference 
of ideals concerning human welfare and the 
means of promoting it, the ideals of the United 

^ An address on Forefathers' Day, 1914, before the New 
England Society in the City of New York. 



A FREE CHUBCH IN A FREE STATE IN 1620 165 

States containing a much larger element of lib- 
erty and independence for the individual, and 
of public confidence in the fruits of individual 
liberty, than any European nation exhibits, ex- 
cept Switzerland. In order that different races 
or stocks should live peacefully and helpfully 
beside each other under the same free govern- 
ments, conjoined but not commingled, as in the 
United States of to-day, it is only necessary that 
they should all come to cherish the same ideals 
of public liberty, public justice, and cooperative 
management. That is the true assimilation of 
different stocks or races, and none other is 
needed. 

As a matter of fact, the present ideals of the 
people of the United States are in a large meas- 
ure identical with the ideals which were dear 
to the Pilgrim First-comers or Forefathers, who, 
to the number of 233, landed at Plymouth be- 
tween December, 1620, and July, 1623. These 
were the Separatist immigrants, who had sufr 
fered severely in England for conscience' sake, 
and had dared the perils of the ocean and the 
wilderness to found a new commonwealth where 
they might enjoy freedom to worship God in 
the way they preferred. I wish to review this 
evening the ideals of the Pilgrims, and to point 



166 THE BO AD TOWARD PEACE 

out in what measure their ideals have become 
those of the American people. 

The most precious of the Pilgrim ideals was 
that of civil and religious liberty. It was a re- 
ligious bond which held them together in their 
flight from Scrooby at great loss and under 
many hardships, and during their twelve years* 
exile in Holland, where by great industry and 
frugality a few of them repaired somewhat their 
broken fortunes. It was a religious motive which 
governed the adult males of the Mayflower com- 
pany, only forty-one in number, in signing a 
compact, just before they landed on the Massa- 
chusetts shore, by which they set up a govern- 
ment that rested exclusively on the consent of 
those to be governed and on manhood suffrage. 
These few plain men then and there did an im- 
mortal deed, the sudden fruitage of the experi- 
ence of their church in England and in Hol- 
land, and of the doctrines taught them by their 
pastor and elders. The words of that compact 
cannot be too often quoted : " We, whose names 
are under written, . . . having undertaken for 
the glory of God and advancement of the Chris- 
tian faith, and honor of our King and country, 
to plant the first colony in the northern parts 



A FREE CHUBCH IN A FEES STATE IN 1620 167 

of Virginia, do, by these presents, solemnly and 
mutually in the presence of God and of one 
another, covenant and bind ourselves together 
into a civil body politic for our better ordering 
and preservation, and furtherance of the ends 
aforesaid." That is the ideal origin for a free 
state. By following that ideal, town, city, and 
state governments have been firmly planted all 
across the American continent. By how many 
generations were the signers of that compact 
in advance of their times ? Let the Schleswig- 
Holstein of 1864 answer ; let the Alsace-Lor- 
raine of 1870 answer ; let the Belgium of to-day 
answer. More than two hundred years later 
Cavour, struggling for Italian unity, cried out 
for a free church in a free state. Nearly three 
hundred years later a French republic broke 
with a great church long established in France. 
In both cases the doctrine of the Mayflower 
Pilgrims found new applications ; for the Pil- 
grims brought with them to Plymouth the con- 
ception not only of a free state, but also of 
a free church. Pastor E-obinson's church was 
called Separatist, and later Independent ; and 
later still its polity was known as Congregational. 
It had no bishop and no synod. There was no 
ecclesiasticism and no mysticism about it. The 



168 THE EOAD TOWARD PEACE 

congregation elected their pastor and elders, 
their church welcoming to the communion 
service members of the Anglican, Genevan, 
Lutheran, Dutch, and Presbyterian churches. 
From these Separatists, transplanted to the Mas- 
sachusetts wilderness, sprang, therefore, a gov- 
ernment founded on civil and religious liberty, 
and a complete toleration of all religions by the 
state. John Robinson's doctrine, that God had 
never yet revealed his whole will, and that more 
truth and light were yet to break forth, is now 
the doctrine of all liberals the world over. The 
advance of natural science within the last one 
hundred and fifty years has made this doctrine 
of expectation familiar to all thinking people; 
but the Pilgrims accepted and practised it as a 
religious doctrine, and gave it practical expres- 
sion in the church and the state they organized 
in 1620. 

After the compact or covenant had been 
signed in the cabin of the Mayflower by the 
forty-one adult males, these same men proceeded 
to elect a governor for the commonwealth thus 
constituted ; and every year thereafter they 
elected their chief executive to serve for the 
term of one year. This short-term, elected ex- 
ecutive was maintained in the old colony until 



A FBEE CHURCH IN A FBEE STATE IN 1620 169 

1692, when, to their great regret, the descend- 
ants of the Forefathers found themselves ab- 
sorbed into the Royal Province of Massachu- 
setts, which extended from Nova Scotia to the 
Vineyard Archipelago, and was provided with 
a royal governor. To liberals the world over 
this achievement of the Pilgrims seems more 
significant to-day than it ever has before ; be- 
cause a prime cause of the fearful catastrophe 
which has lately befallen Europe is the retention 
there of hereditary, permanent executives over 
whom the mass of the people have no control 
whatever, and who can make war without con- 
sulting anybody but a cabinet they have them- 
selves selected, or a few other hereditary ex- 
ecutives. In 1620 this small band of English 
Non-Conformists gave the first example in the 
world of a free and progressive church in a state 
created and controlled by free men, both church 
and state being led and served by elected offi- 
cers. 

The Pilgrims were plain, laboring people, 
who all worked with their hands, and expected 
to get their living as " Planters " on the wild 
shores of northern Virginia. As a matter of 
fact, they made their living by farming, fish- 
ing, hunting, and practising the elementary 



170 THE BOAD TOWABD PEACE 

trades of a new settlement. A few of them 
were good writers and intelligent business men ; 
but many of their leaders and officers found it 
more convenient to make their mark than to 
write their signature on deeds or records ; and 
it is probable that few of the women could 
write, though more could read. They could all, 
however, take in and appreciate the exhorta- 
tions of their ministers orally communicated. 
Such being their quality, it is remarkable that 
the Articles of Agreement under which the Pil- 
grims set sail from England contained sound 
principles affecting the relations of capital to 
labor which have not secured wide adoption in 
the industrial and commercial world of to-day. 
The Pilgrims sailed from England under 
articles of agreement which were to govern the 
proceedings of a stock company, — the shares 
of which were held by two classes of persons, 
one called "Adventurers," and the other 
'^Planters." The adventurers were inen who 
merely put capital into the outfitting of the 
expedition. The planters were persons who 
crossed the ocean, and were to bear the hard- 
ships and the labors of the expedition. The 
planters might, or might not, put capital into 
the venture. Some did acquire shares in the 



A FREE CHURCH IN A FREE STATE IN 1620 171 

stock company as adventurers by putting in 
money or money's worth in goods ; but the 
greater part did not hold shares, except as 
planters. Every planter being aged sixteen 
years and upwards, received on going a single 
share in the stock company, rated at ten pounds. 
A planter who carried with him his wife and 
children or servants was allowed for every per- 
son sixteen years old and upward a share in 
the company and a share for every two chil- 
dren between ten and sixteen years old. Every 
child under ten who went in the ship was to 
receive in the ultimate division of the holdings 
of the company fifty acres of unmanured land. 
All the planters were to be fed and clothed out 
of the common stock and goods of the com- 
pany. Each planter was to work four days in 
each week for the company, and two for him- 
self and family. At the end of seven years, 
each planter, head of a family or a group, 
should own the house and garden land occupied 
by him and his. The undertaking entered into 
on these terms was a strong case of cooperation 
and cooperative management for a short term 
of years, with acquisition by every head of a 
family at the end of that short term of a house 
and garden. 



172 THE BOAD TOWARD PEACE 

The first assignments of land at Plymouth 
were made by lot, had equal areas, and were 
supposed to be of very nearly equal value. The 
family, rather than the individual, was the social 
unit used in the allotment. When fifteen cattle 
arrived in 1627 for distribution among the col- 
onists, with some she goats and swine, these 
animals were distributed among twelve groups 
into which the one hundred and fifty-six planter 
owners of the company's stock were divided for 
the purpose, each animal to be kept for ten 
years, and then returned to the public store 
with one half its increase. Another example of 
cooperative management intended to encourage 
individual responsibility and effort ! 

The Pilgrims thoroughly understood that 
capital and labor must cooperate, in order to 
successful production ; and they acted consist- 
ently on this understanding. Being fed and 
clothed at the expense of the company, they 
were willing to work for the company two thirds 
of their time without wages ; but they obtained 
shares in the company without payment of cash, 
in consideration of the risk they ran in putting 
their lives and capacities at the service of the 
company in a dangerous venture, and in invest- 
ing two thirds of their labor for seven years 



A FBEE CHURCH IN A FBEE STATE IN 1620 173 

with the company. Moreover, in return for the 
assumption of these risks and for their labor, 
each family would obtain possession at the end 
of seven years of a house and land, on which, 
however, they would probably have spent the 
other third of their working time. This eco- 
nomic arrangement could not have been brought 
about, except in a homogeneous community 
which was thoroughly democratic in principle 
and practice. Is there any industrial organiza- 
tion to-day in which democracy and the recogni- 
tion of the laborers' contribution in risk and 
work to the cost of production are better recog- 
nized, or more wisely dealt with, than in the 
Pilgrims' Stock Company? Ultimately the 
planters bought out the adventurers, and owned 
the whole stock. What prophets the Pilgrims 
were of far-away reforms ! 

The Pilgrims recognized that they had lead- 
ers; and the common people selected these 
leaders with great judgment, and whenever 
they found a good one were constant toward 
him ; but the manners and customs of the com- 
munity were extremely simple, and all men 
were equal before the law. On the other hand, 
the Pilgrims never tried to prevent the diversi- 
ties in regard to possessions which inevitably 



174 THE BOAD TOWABD PEACE 

arise in any free community. Only despotism, 
autocratic or socialistic, can prevent the diver- 
sity in men's capacity from producing diversity 
in possessions. Nothing of the feudal system 
came across the ocean with the Pilgrims, and 
nothing of ecclesiastical control. 

For the protection of the colony, every able- 
bodied citizen was expected to bear arms. Every 
youth learnt the use of the simple weapons 
which were then available for the chase and for 
war. The Pilgrims started the New England 
muster and militia system, prototype of the ad- 
mirable military organization of republican 
Switzerland which is now suggesting a way 
out of European militarism. 

In 1643, after a six years* discussion begun 
by Plymouth, a confederation called "The 
United Colonies of New England," was formed 
by the four colonies of Massachusetts, Plym- 
outh, Connecticut, and New Haven to make 
common cause in offensive and defensive war. 
Each confederate was to choose annually two 
church-members as its commissioners in the 
league, each colony having the same number 
of representatives without regard to popula- 
tion. No single colony was to make war. The 
quota which each colony contributed to the 



A FREE CHURCH IN A FREE STATE IN 1620 175 

intercolonial force was proportionate to the num- 
ber of its able-bodied males between the ages of 
sixteen and sixty. This confederation was loose 
and ill-defined ; but it was maintained for forty 
years, and supplied ideas for several later feder- 
ations on the American continent. Obviously, 
it might suggest some clauses in the constitu- 
tion of the now much-desired United States of 
Europe, such as the equal representation of the 
several states in the central council, the quota 
of each state in the international force propor- 
tionate to its military population, and the rule 
that no single state shall make war. In this 
direction Europe has never got so far as the Pil- 
grims had in 1643. 

Down in the spring of 1623, all labor in fish- 
ing and farming had been in common ; and the 
product in food had been placed in the public 
store to be shared equally by all the workers, 
whether they worked zealously and effectively, 
or languidly and shiftlessly; otherwise, there 
had been no community of goods. In the spring 
of that year the supply of food in the public 
storehouse was very low; and there was serious 
apprehension of a famine before a new crop 
could be gathered. The straits were all the more 
serious because the colony possessed at the time 



176 THE BOAD TOWARD PEACE 

no domestic animals that yielded milk or meat. 
No cattle were imported until 1624. The gov- 
ernor under such conditions could not keep the 
people hard at work ; and it distinctly appeared 
that the motive of common benefit was inferior 
in stimulating force to the motive of personal, 
individual or family possession. The elders of 
the Pilgrims were practical men, who saw that 
a new method of dealing with the labor ques- 
tion was urgently needed, particularly in view 
of the approaching scarcity of food. They, 
therefore, assigned a lot for one year to each 
household, at the rate of an acre for every mem- 
ber. The lots were to be cultivated at the pleas- 
ure of the holders, who were to own the crops, 
after giving a small portion to the public treas- 
ury. This introduction of the principle of pri- 
vate ownership, in addition to the well-distri- 
buted ownership of shares in the stock of the 
company, produced an important effect, — a 
much larger area was planted, and men, women, 
and children worked with a new ardor in the 
cultivation of their own lots. It took the leaders 
of the Pilgrims only two years and a half to 
learn that the institution of private property 
appeals to a good side of human nature, and 
that there is no safe substitute for it. To be 



A FBEE CEUBCH IN A FREE STATE IN 1620 177 

sure, they learned this lesson under conditions 
of severe anxiety and stress. To-day the civil- 
ized world has to listen to many socialistic 
prophets and disputants who close their eyes to 
the patent fact that the mass of mankind need 
the stimulus of private property in order to 
maintain a fair degree of industry and frugahty. 
Two years before the Pilgrims left Leyden, 
their pastor, John Robinson, and their elder, 
William Brewster, united in a letter which 
ended with five reasons for the proposed emi- 
gration. The fourth reason is as follows : "We 
are knit together in a body in a most strict and 
sacred bond and covenant of the Lord, of the 
violation whereof we make great conscience, 
and by virtue whereof we do hold ourselves 
straightly tied to all care of such other's good, 
and of the whole by every one, and so mutu- 
ally." It would be hard to find a better state- 
ment than that of the fundamental conception 
of modern non-militant socialism — each for all 
and all for each ; but the Pilgrims were not fore- 
runners of socialism ; because they fully appre- 
ciated the advantages of the institution of pri- 
vate property not only for stimulating industry 
and frugality, but also for strengthening the 
family bond. Their unit of social organization 



178 THE BOAD TOWABD PEACE 

was the family; and they had no thought of 
permitting the lazy and improvident to plant 
themselves on the backs of the energetic and 
prudent members of the community. The philo- 
sophic socialism of the nineteenth century would 
tend to weaken the family bond, and would sub- 
ject the individual human being to a harsh col- 
lective despotism, against which the Pilgrim 
spirit would have revolted. 

No sketch of the Pilgrims would be adequate 
which did not mention the heroism of their 
women. The women that came to America from 
that Separatist flock in Leyden washed, cooked, 
made clothing, bore, nursed, and tended chil- 
dren, and watched anxiously for the return of 
the men, who often had to go to distant fields 
or woods, or on remote fishing expeditions, or 
on exploring and hunting parties. What the 
risks were that the women took may be illus- 
trated by the single fact, that out of the eigh- 
teen women who were on board the Mayflower, 
fourteen were buried in unmarked graves within 
six months of the day that the Mayflower an- 
chored within the hook of Cape Cod. Nothing 
daunted, other women of the Pilgrim mind 
came over from Holland and England to take 
the places of the dead, and maintain the stag- 



A FREE CHURCH IN A FREE STATE IN 1620 179 

gering colony; and ever since just such women 
have accompanied the pioneering line of ad- 
venturous free men, as it has moved slowly 
across the continent for nearly three centuries. 
The Pilgrim women deserve, and please God 
shall have, the same reward which Jesus prom- 
ised to the woman who hroke over his hody the 
alahaster box of precious ointment: "whereso- 
ever this Gospel shall be preached in the whole 
world, there shall also this that this woman 
hath done be told for a memorial of her." The 
Pilgrim ideal of woman was the courageous, 
capable, strong, devoted type, sacrificing self 
for love and duty, and rejoicing in her work. 
Is there any better type to-day? Are there not 
some inferior types in public evidence? 

Within the last few months, I have been often 
asked in letters — signed or unsigned — what 
America owes to England. If I had answered 
these questions, one element in my reply would 
have been : America owes to England the ideals 
of the Pilgrims — a debt never to be forgotten. 
Another element in my reply would have been : 
America owes to England John Milton's preach- 
ing of civil and religious liberty — a preaching 
contemporaneous with many of the experiences 
of that group of brave men and women who 



180 THE BOAT) TOWARD PEACE 

risked their all in the little colony on the deso- 
late coast of Massachusetts, not in search of 
gold or trade, but only hoping that they and 
their children might be free. The American 
people believes, as the Pilgrim Church beheved, 
that more truth and light are constantly to be 
made known to man, and that it is truth that 
makes men free. More truth — scientific, philo- 
sophical, or religious — more freedom for man- 
kind. If this faith can now be implanted in the 
international mind of Europe as the moral issue 
of the present cataclysm, the huge sorrow and 
desolation of that Continent may yet be turned 
into gladness and hope. 



CHAPTER XIII 

NATIONAL EFFICIENCY BEST DEVELOPED 
UNDER FREE GOVERNMENTS^ 

The causes of this fearful war are often dis- 
cussed as if they were to be sought in the 
month before the war actually broke out. We 
hear men talking as if the exchange of tele- 
grams and notes between the monarchs just 
before the war could supply an intelligent 
understanding of the causes of the outbreak. 
We hear the conversations between the vari- 
ous chancelleries of Europe in July spoken 
of as if the real cause of the war was to be 
found in them, or, indeed, in the sequence of 
the orders given for mobilization. I have even 
read articles in which the cause of the war was 
found in the assassination of the heir to the 
Austro-Hungarian throne. 

Now, to my mind, all these so-called causes 
are merely superficial events, which might more 
properly be called the occasions than the causes 
of the war. To my thinking, the causes of the 

^ An address before the Harvard Club of Boston, Jan- 
uary 15, 1915, revised and enlarged. 



182 THE ROAD TOWARD PEACE 

war are very deep-seated, and have to be traced 
back through long years, and, indeed, through 
generations of men. They are states of mind 
rather than events. They have their sources in 
racial feelings and to some extent in religious 
differences; in the ambitions of princes; in 
long-cherished aspirations and ambitions of 
peoples ; in continuously developed policies of 
governments ; and deeper still in great popular 
emotions. If such are the real causes of the 
war, we need to consider carefully the historical 
development of these aspirations, ambitions, 
and emotions, which have had a national scope. 
This war has brought out very strongly the 
sentiment of nationality, — a sentiment the 
origins and conditions of which are peculiarly 
difficult to appreciate and understand. Many 
people think that a common language is neces- 
sary to the development of the sentiment of 
nationality ; but how many instances there are 
in the world in which many languages are used 
in the territory ascribed to a nation. At this 
moment there is no country which nourishes a 
stronger spirit of nationality than little Swit- 
zerland, the model republic of the world. Now, 
in that small territory four languages are used, 
each by thousands of people; and in the legis- 



EFFICIENCY AND FBEE GOVERNMENTS 183 

lative assembly, if a member does not speak at 
the rostrum in French or German, an inter- 
preter is placed beside the orator who keeps 
along with him; so that the two voices are 
going on at the same time. Belgium is a strong 
nationality as regards sentiment, but at least 
two quite different languages are spoken in 
that country. In the vast territory of China 
many dialects exist, so different that the people 
of one section may not understand the people 
of any other. One almost wishes that a com- 
mon language could be spoken of as a source 
or necessary condition of a strong sentiment of 
nationality; but there are too many cases in 
the world where a strong national feeling pre- 
vails, and yet there is no common language. 
We Americans have been in the habit of think- 
ing that the use of the English language all 
over our immense territory has contributed to 
our sense of national unity and well-being; 
and, indeed, it probably has. Nevertheless, that 
test of nationality will not hold in the modern 
world. 

The national sentiment in Great Britain, 
France, Italy, Germany, and Russia is to-day 
intense, and, so far as we can see, equally in- 
tense in all these countries. Apparently little 



184 THE ROAD TOWARD PEACE 

distinction can be drawn between national sen- 
timent in an immobile empire like Russia, under 
an autocratic government like that of Germany, 
in a sober, experienced, constitutional monarchy 
like that of England, or in a new republic like 
France. We do not find the cause or source of 
this intense popular sentiment in the form of 
government to which the people are accustomed. 
And yet one cannot imagine any satisfactory 
settlement of this terrible world-conflict, which 
will not take more account than any settlement 
of a European war has ever done before, of 
this emotion or sentiment of nationality. 

The experience of Europe during the last 
sixty years has been peculiar in one respect, — 
it has been a period in which peoples who pos- 
sess a common language, or a common senti- 
ment of nationality, and are derived from sim- 
ilar racial stocks, have succeeded in getting 
together in larger entities. That has been 
emphatically the case with Germany and with 
Italy ; and until the Second Balkan War the 
well-wishers for Europe hoped that it was 
going to be the case in the whole Balkan region ; 
but the second war defeated all such hopes. 
What great changes have been wrought in 
Europe since the close of the Thirty Years' 



EFFICIENCY AND FREE GOVERNMENTS 185 

War ! That war ended in the recognition and 
establishment of a large number of separate, 
independent, small states and principalities. 
When this present war ends, we may reason- 
ably expect that it will result in the develop- 
ment of some new large states in Europe, fed- 
erations, perhaps, and some new small states, 
but also in a greater security for the smaller 
states over against the larger. 

Several European nations have been infected 
at various times — England first, since the de- 
cline of Spain — with a false and dangerous 
conception of the state as an imperial being, 
independent of ordinary ethical considerations, 
entitled to the unquestioning obedience and ser- 
vice of its subjects, aiming at the development 
of strong types of men and women without 
much regard to the freedom or happiness of 
the individual, and claiming dominion over 
neighbors, oceans, or remote possessions in 
other parts of the world. British imperialism 
had sound commercial and industrial objects, 
and was qualified by much domestic freedom, 
and the policy of free trade. Being an island. 
Great Britain tried to rule the seas, in order 
that her indispensable supplies of food and 
raw materials might never be cut off. Her Con- 



186 THE ROAD TOWARD PEACE 

tinental imitators bave not had her domestic 
freedom, her affiliated free commonwealths, her 
free trade, or her strong reason for possessing 
mastery of the oceans ; but they have had, and 
some of them still have, the imperialistic fever 
in its hottest form. 

If, then, we must look for the causes of this 
unprecedented convulsion in these deep-rooted 
popular aspirations and ambitions, what shall we 
say about the slow but steady growth of these 
sentiments in Germany? Some people ascribe 
this widespread war to the German Emperor 
or Cabinet, or to some particular German 
teachers and authors, or to the growth of a 
strong, united military caste in Germany. All 
those influences doubtless contributed in some 
measure to the outbreak ; but the real cause of 
the successive military aggressions on the part 
of Germany since 1864 lies in the gradual prev- 
alence throughout that nation, and particularly 
throughout its educated classes, of an exagger- 
ated estimate of the bodily and spiritual merits 
of the German people, and of a belief that the 
national greatness and the progress of character- 
istic German civilization were to be attained 
through the development of the most tremen- 



EFFICIENCY AND FREE GOVERNMENTS 187 

dous national Force that could possibly be con- 
trived and brought into being, and through the 
gratification of the intense German desire for 
domination in Europe, and later in the world. 

The Government of Germany is the most 
autocratic in Europe. It has always been so in 
Prussia ; and since German unification in 1871 
that description applies to the whole of Ger- 
many. One of the most extraordinary phenom- 
ena in connection with this ferocious war is the 
unanimous opinion among German scholars, his- 
torians, statesmen, and diplomats, and indeed 
throughout the educated classes, that — as was 
lately said to me in a letter from a German 
friend — " We Germans are just as free as you 
Americans are." They really believe that. This 
unanimous opinion is a complete demonstration 
of the effect of the autocratic Government which 
has long existed in Germany on the spirit and 
temper of the German people as a whole. They 
do not know what political and social liberty is. 
They have no conception of such liberty as 
we enjoy. They know nothing at all about the 
liberty England has won through Parliamen- 
tary government, through party government. 
Their complete ignorance on that subject is the 
explanation of the fatal mistake the German 



188 THE BOAD TOWABD PEACE 

Government made in going to war last summer 
before they knew what England was going to 
do, or could do. The German Government 
thoroughly believed that in the existing condi- 
tion of party government in England, with the 
Ulster disturbance unsettled, and the trades- 
union difficulties on hand, England not only 
would not go to war, but could not. One could 
not have a better illustration of the complete 
ignorance of the German people as to what 
political and social liberty really is. The Ger- 
man diplomats misinformed their government 
about the state of Great Britain and Ireland, 
and of France, in spite of their ample system 
of resident informers ; because neither they nor 
their informers understood the political action 
of a free people. At this moment, the German 
Government is being misinformed in like man- 
ner about the state of American public opinion. 
To the German mind political liberty means 
public incapacity and weakness — particularly 
in war. 

In the earlier steps of the war, Germany met 
with a series of surprises; because the German 
Government and the military caste in Germany 
did not understand what comparatively free peo- 
ples value, what their ideals are, and what they 



EFFICIENCY AND FREE GOVERNMENTS 189 

are capable of undertaking and enduring in de- 
fense of their ideals. For instance, the German 
doctrine about the justifiableness of violating a 
contract or a treaty on grounds of military ne- 
cessity was universally accepted in Germany as 
right. Germans do not know how free peoples 
regard the sanctity of contract, not only for 
business purposes, but for political purposes, to 
say nothing of honorable obligation. Nothing 
could be franker than the original explanation 
which the German Chancellor gave of the 
breaking of the treaties concerning the neu- 
trality of Belgium ; but his frankness is evidence 
that he did not understand in the least the free- 
man's idea of the sanctity of contract — the 
foundation of all public law and usage in a free 
country. In a country despotically or auto- 
cratically ruled, there is no such condition of 
public opinion. 

More and more, as time goes on, this war 
develops into a conflict between free institu- 
tions and autocratic institutions. Of course, 
the position of Russia as an ally of France and 
England somewhat shrouds or complicates this 
fact ; because the Russian people is by inherit- 
ance and in some respects by nature a people 
which submits to despotic government. Her 



190 THE ROAD TOWARD PEACE 

exceptional position as an ally of two free 
countries is due to a long-nourished indigna- 
tion against Austria-Hungary and Germany 
for presenting obstacles year after year and 
generation after generation to the gratification 
of Russian ambition for aggrandizement in the 
Balkan countries and the Near East. That 
ambition and some stirrings toward liberty may 
have put Russia in its exceptional position by 
the side of two free countries. 

If, now, we take it for granted that the 
question between free and autocratic institu- 
tions in Europe, the question of more public 
liberty, the question of civilization developing 
under the forms of free government rather 
than under the forms of autocratic govern- 
ment, is the real issue this war is to decide, it 
becomes a very interesting study for all the 
freer peoples how German efficiency is going 
to turn out in competition with such efficiency 
as the freer nations develop. The military re- 
sult of the war is going to turn on the com- 
parative efficiency of the military and naval 
forces of the opposing parties, and on the 
efficiency with which the economic resources 
of the several nations are used. Numbers are 



EFFICIENCY AND FREE GOVERNMENTS 191 

SO enormous on each side that the result will 
not be determined so much by mere numbers, 
as by the efficiency of the armed forces of the 
combatants, and of their industrial and finan- 
cial forces. 

German efficiency has been an object of 
great admiration, not only in this country, but 
in England, France, and Eussia, for twenty- 
five or thirty years. We have all admired it in 
the recent commercial and industrial develop- 
ment of Germany — not less remarkable be- 
cause it started about sixty years ago from a 
low level. We have admired it, too, in the 
efficiency of her military and naval develop- 
ment. It is an extraordinary phenomenon in 
the history of the nineteenth century — this 
wonderful efficiency ; but German efficiency is 
of a peculiar type. It is an efficiency in admin- 
istration — in business administration, in muni- 
cipal government strikingly, and in all the 
national government bureaus. It is an efficiency 
which takes hold of every child in Germany at 
birth, and follows every youth and every man 
and woman through life until death. It is that 
very efficiency which has prevented the last 
two generations of Germans from knowing 
anything about liberty. It is in the highest 



192 THE BOAD TOWABD PEACE 

degree an autocratic efficiency in all walks of 
German life, including education and the rela- 
tions between the sexes. The whole course of 
elementary and secondary education for every 
German boy or girl is determined by the Gov- 
ernment, and there is no election by the pupil 
in it, no choice by the child, except in its later 
stages the choice between a technical school or 
a gymnasium; and even that choice is often 
made not by the child, but for him. 

A significant illustration of the German re- 
gard for strength and force, and contempt for 
■weakness and gentleness, is to be found in the 
low estimate they place on the social and intel- 
lectual influence of women. A German woman 
at her best is a successful housewife, and dili- 
gent attendant on husband and children; she 
is seldom the intellectual and spiritual comrade 
of her husband and the inspirer of her grown- 
up children, as a woman is in the freer coun- 
tries of Europe and in America. The contrast 
between the status of the German woman and 
that of the American woman is strong indeed. 
The German woman of to-day has grown up 
and lived in an atmosphere of compulsion and 
discipline which no American woman has had 
to endure for two centuries past. 



EFFICIENCY AND FREE GOVERNMENTS 193 

The Germans are fond of mentioning their 
"academic freedom," the freedom of their 
learned men; but that is much exaggerated in 
German descriptions of their university life. 
The German universities are chiefly supported 
and ruled by the Government; and there are no 
free endowed institutions to compete with them. 
The whole world is deeply indebted in unnum- 
bered ways to the German universities of the 
last hundred years; but for any vital teaching 
of civil and religious liberty one must go back 
to individual German teachers and preachers 
of an earlier time. The entrance to every 
learned and scientific profession in Germany, 
and to the highly trained military and naval 
caste is strictly guarded and controlled by the 
Government. 

German efficiency, however, is a very real 
and formidable thing in all the competitions of 
the civilized world; so that the most interest- 
ing question to be studied as to the probable 
outcome of the European War is this — is Ger- 
many with its autocracy more efficient or less 
efficient than France and England with their 
liberties? The German way of procuring 
industrial and commercial efficiency is to make 
each individual man, in the first place, a man 



194 THE BO AD TOWARD PEACE 

well trained for the exact service lie is to ren- 
der, and then to keep him under a severe dis- 
cipline which will result in his doing every 
time exactly what he has been trained to do. 
He may also be induced in some measure to a 
perfect subordination by a bonus, prize, or 
honorary reward. That is the German method 
of efficiency all the way through industrial life 
— giving instruction and training enough to 
produce the amount of skill needed for the 
daily task, and then enforcing that subjection 
of the worker which results in thorough coor- 
dination and cooperation in the complex pro- 
cess of production. The efficiency of their mili- 
tary system is obtained in like manner — by 
thorough training which leads to the instinctive 
cooperation of the individual with a mass of 
comrades, and to an absolute obedience unto 
death. 

Now, what have the freer nations to say about 
their chance in industrial and military com- 
petition with the German autocratic system? 
They say in speech and action, " We believe 
a man or a nation will develop greater mental 
capacity and moral force with freedom than 
without it. Our philosophy of life teaches that 



EFFICIENCY AND FREE GOVERNMENTS 195 

doctrine; our history illustrates it; our prac- 
tice and experience prove it." Seven nations 
conspicuously illustrate to-day the worth of lib- 
erty in national development, — Great Britain 
and her affiliated Commonwealths, France, Italy, 
Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the 
United States, and, in addition, the Scandina- 
vian group of peoples. Italy struggled long 
under various oppressors. She won at last unity 
and freedom ; because she brought forth such 
independent spirits as Dante, Leonardo da 
Vinci, Savonarola, Galileo, Michael Angelo, 
Cavour, and Garibaldi. The Dutch were pio- 
neers in the long fight for liberty. Since 
Elizabeth's adventurers ran about the oceans, 
Cromwell marshalled his Independents, and 
Milton taught civil and religious liberty and 
freedom for the press, English political, indus- 
trial, and religious life has been instinct with 
liberty. The French political philosophers of 
the eighteenth century set forth eloquently the 
rights of Man ; and the French Revolution 
strove boldly, though ignorantly, to win those 
rights, and, in spite of its violences and crudi- 
ties, spread through the world the potent con- 
ceptions of liberty, equality, and fraternity. 
The mutual jealousy of their neighbors has 



196 TEE ROAD TOWARD PEACE 

permitted Belgium and Switzerland to prosper 
in comparative freedom. The Pilgrim Fathers 
planted on American soil the seeds of the best 
English and Dutch liberties ; and from those 
seeds there came, in three centuries, a solid 
growth of liberty under law, — the widest lib- 
erty, political, industrial, and social that the 
world has ever known, conceived by free spirits, 
embodied in legislation, and cherished in the 
hearts of a multitudinous people. The Scandi- 
navian peoples have suffered much from more 
powerful neighbors, but have never lost the ad- 
venturous spirit of the Norsemen, or failed to 
exercise that right of private judgment which 
was the best teaching of the Protestant Refor- 
mation, or ceased to manifest the sturdy, inde- 
pendent spirit of their race. The Scandinavian 
emigrants to America make admirable citizens 
of the American Republic without any change 
of disposition or character. 

The efficiency of all these nations is based 
on a high degree of personal initiative and of 
political and industrial freedom, — not on the 
subjection or implicit obedience of the individ- 
ual, but on the energy and good-will in work 
which result from individual freedom, ambition, 
and initiative. 



EFFICIENCY AND FREE GOVERNMENTS 197 

If this doctrine is correct, the remarkable in- 
crease of industrial and commercial efficiency 
during the past one hundred and fifty years 
should have proceeded from the freer nations, 
and not from the nations governed autocratic- 
ally. It is an interesting inquiry, therefore, 
whether this wonderfully increased efficiency 
has proceeded from Russia, Germany, Austria, 
and Turkey, or from England, France, Italy, 
Holland, Scandinavia, and the United States. 
A brief review of the sources of the important 
discoveries and inventions, which have made 
the industries of the civilized world vastly more 
effective since 1830 than they ever were be- 
fore, will convince any impartial person that 
the means of improvement have come from the 
free countries, and not from the countries des- 
potically governed. Going back to the latter 
part of the eighteenth century, we find that 
propulsion by steam on land and water was 
first made commercially successful by English- 
men and Americans, and that English and 
French chemists made the fundamental discov- 
eries in chemical theory. In the early part of 
the nineteenth century, the development of the 
factory system with steam-driven machinery was 
an English achievement, and later an American. 



198 THE ROAD TOWARD PEACE 

Coming on in the nineteenth century, it was 
Americans who developed the telegraph and 
telephone as industrial implements, and thereby 
changed in large measure the habits of indus- 
trial, commercial, and financial life, and in many 
respects of domestic and family life also. It was 
an Italian who invented and introduced in prac- 
tice wireless telegraphy, — a delightful instance 
of the transmission of a genius for physics 
in the same nation through centuries. It was 
Americans who invented and made commer- 
cially practical electric lighting and the wide 
diffusion of mechanical power by electricity. 
The explosive engine was developed as an in- 
dustrial agent in France; and the gasolene 
motor and the automobile have been French, 
English, and American developments. The 
aeroplane heavier than air was invented by Pro- 
fessor Langley, when Secretary of the Smith- 
sonian Institution, and was developed for prac- 
tical use by two other Americans — the brothers 
Wright. The cotton-gin, on which the whole 
cotton textile industry is founded, was the in- 
vention of an American, as were also the sew- 
ing-machine, the typewriter, and all sorts of 
shoe machinery. So was the job printing-press 
with the type held, not on a horizontal plane, 



EFFICIENCY AND FREE GOVERNMENTS 199 

but at any convenient angle with the paper to 
be printed — an invention out of which came 
the rotary press, which is to-day an indispensa- 
ble instrument for the quick and wide circula- 
tion of news. It was America that built the 
first monitor and the first submarine ; and it 
was England that built the first dreadnought. 
Turning to a totally different field of discovery, 
anaesthesia was an American invention ; and its 
wide usefulness was first demonstrated in an 
American hospital. Asepsis, a discovery of equal 
value, was introduced by Lister, a British sub- 
ject. Another Englishman invented and brought 
into use inoculation against typhoid fever. It 
was American surgeons and members of the 
Army Medical Corps, temporarily serving in 
Cuba, who showed the world how to prevent 
the spread of yellow fever. The immense rub- 
ber industry throughout the world is based on 
the invention of the American Goodyear, who 
discovered that the mixing of sulphur with 
rubber produced an elastic, waterproof mate- 
rial, capable of innumerable useful applications 
for which pure rubber was not fit. The great 
inventions in business organization, have, of 
course, proceeded from the freer countries, and 
not from those despotically governed, — such, 



200 THE BOAD TOWABD PEACE 

for example, as the organization of the ocean 
liners running to all parts of the world, which 
is in the main an English invention. The or- 
ganization of the great business of taking pe- 
troleum out of the earth, piping the oil over 
^reat distances, distilling and refining it, and 
distributing it in tank-steamers, tank-wagons, 
and cans all over the earth, was an American 
invention. The conception of the huge and 
complex business of the United States Steel 
Corporation, and the putting of that concep- 
tion into practice, is another American inven- 
tion of great significance. The legal invention 
of the corporation with limited liability, which 
has led to an immense development of indus- 
trial and commercial productiveness, is English 
and American ; and this management of indus- 
tries by corporations set up in free governments 
has, in turn, become a great reinforcement of 
free institutions. 

Obviously, we are not tracing here results of 
blind chance, or of any sort of coincidence or 
accident. We are recognizing the legitimate 
fruits of liberty. It is, of course, true that Ger- 
many has adopted, adapted, and used with great 
skill all the inventions that have been men- 
tioned, and especially in organizing and using 



EFFICIENCY AND FREE GOVERNMENTS 201 

her army and navy. She has also used them all 
in the remarkable development of her industries 
during the past fifty years ; but she invented 
and brought into use none of them ; nor did 
Russia, Austria, or Turkey. Most of the inven- 
tions mentioned are indispensable to the carry- 
ing on of the present war in Europe ; and many 
of them were indispensable to the preparations 
for that war, carried on through long years be- 
fore; but all of them, except the distinctly 
naval inventions, were made for peaceful uses 
— to promote the industrial productiveness and 
the well-being of the human race. 

It is an interesting observation that universal 
education, to the lower grades of which all chil- 
dren are compelled, seems to have but slight 
effect on the kind of national efficiency here 
considered. For one hundred years past, sys- 
tematic education for the whole people has been 
better planned and carried on in Germany than 
it has been in any of the freer countries. Large 
portions of the Italian population have had no 
access to schools until lately. England had noth- 
ing that could be called a system of popular 
education until 1870-71 ; France began to put 
universal education into force under the present 
Republic ; and to this day millions of American 



202 THE EOAD TOW ABB PEACE 

children have scant access to elementary educa- 
tion, and none at all to secondary. The plain 
fact is that the German system of education 
and government has not had freedom enough 
in it; and that the free peoples, among whom 
there exists a large amount of social and indus- 
trial mobility, are the peoples that have pro- 
duced all the great applied-science inventions 
of the last century and this. The facts of the 
case are unquestionable. The explanation of 
them is, — that under free governments, and 
in communities which have a fair amount of 
social mobility, the rare men are surer to come 
forward into vigorous action, — the men who 
are competent, not only to invent or imagine 
the thing or the method that is next wanted, 
but to put their inventions into practical form, 
and make them useful in the actual industries 
of their nations and the world. Among a free 
people the remarkable human specimen is more 
likely to get his most complete and powerful 
development than among a people subject to 
autocratic government. We may reasonably be- 
lieve, therefore, that there is a power in free 
institutions which leads straight to efficiency in 
the industries of the country, and, in the long 
run and after many experiments and failures, 



EFFICIENCY AND FBEE GOVERNMENTS 203 

to the efficient management of its governmental 
concerns, and that this efficiency can be brought 
to a higher condition in a republic or a con- 
stitutional monarchy than in any despotic or 
autocratic government. 

There is another field of human activity — 
the development of great pioneers in thinking 
and imagining — in which the Germans are ac- 
customed to claim leadership j but that claim is 
■without warrant. In the first place, German lit- 
erature and philosophy are, like German indus- 
trial development, comparatively young. That 
they should become preeminent so soon was not 
to be expected. In the next place, the German 
race has not yet developed leaders of thought 
in literature, philosophy, poetry, and statesman- 
ship who can bear comparison with the supreme 
personages in England, France, and Italy. Ger- 
many has produced no men that can be placed 
beside Dante, Michael Angelo, and Cavour in 
Italy ; Shakespeare, Milton, Newton, Farraday, 
and Darwin in England, or Pasteur in France. 
As to America, it seems to a native American 
profane to mention Bismarck and the German 
Emperor in the same breath with Washington 
and Lincoln. 



204 THE BOAD TOWARD PEACE 

The present war in Europe is going to put to 
a supreme military test this theory concerning 
the surest sources of national ef&ciency. The 
war ought to demonstrate in the end that Ger- 
man efficiency in war is not so great as that of 
England and France, if we include in the defini- 
tion of military efficiency the management of 
the supporting industries, and skill in sum- 
moning and applying financial resources, as well 
as the management of troops in actual fight- 
ing. The war should demonstrate that a volun- 
teer soldier is, on the whole, more effective than 
a conscript; because he has more personal initi- 
ative, more power of independent action, and 
more sense of individual responsibility. The first 
year of the war ought to prove that large and 
effective armies can be put into the field after 
the training of only a few months, if the volun- 
teer recruits come from occupations which call 
for intelligence and cooperative good-will, and 
are inspired by ethical motives which strongly 
appeal to them as individuals. The war ought 
also to prove that the freer a people is, and the 
more accustomed to the exercise of a self-con- 
trolled liberty the more warmly and resolutely 
they will respond to calls on their courage, en- 
durance, and love of country. 



EFFICIENCY AND FREE GOVERNMENTS 205 

The only issue of the war that can possibly 
be satisfactory to the freer nations of Europe, 
or to Americans, is an issue which will further 
in Europe the cause of essential freedom — the 
freedom which can be developed under any con- 
stitutional form of government, but cannot be 
developed under an autocratic form. Therefore, 
we look forward with hope to a diminution in 
Europe of the autocratic forms and an increase 
of the constitutional forms, as well as to better 
security for both large and small states against 
sudden invasion. This better security implies a 
federal council of a few powerful states, the re- 
duction of national armaments, and the creation 
of a federal force competent to impose peace. 

A precious lesson of the war will be — towards 
every kind of national efficiency discipline is 
good, and cooperation is good ; but for the 
highest efficiency both should be consented to 
in liberty. 



CHAPTER XIV 

LESSONS OF THE WAB TO MARCH NINTH 

The observant world has now had ample 
opportunity to establish certain conclusions 
about the new kind of war, and its availability 
as means of adjusting satisfactorily interna- 
tional relations ; and it seems desirable in the 
interest of durable peace in Europe that those 
conclusions should be accurately stated, and 
kept in public view. 

In the first place, the destructiveness of war 
waged on the scale and with the intensity which 
conscript armies, the new means of transporta- 
tion and communication, the new artillery, the 
aeroplanes, the high explosives, and the con- 
tinuity of the fighting on battle fronts of un- 
exampled length, by night as well as by day, 
and in stormy and wintry as well as moderate 
weather, make possible, has proved to be be- 
yond all power of computation, and could not 
have been imagined in advance. Never before 
has there been any approach to the vast kill- 
ing and crippling of men, the destruction of all 



LESSONS OF THE WAB TO MARCH NINTH 207 

sorts of man's structures, — buildings, bridges, 
viaducts, vessels, and docks, — and the physi- 
cal ruin of countless women and children. On 
the seas vessels and cargoes are sunk, instead 
of being carried into port as formerly. 

Through the ravaging of immense areas of 
crop-producing lands, the driving away of the 
people that lived on them, and the dislocation 
of commerce, the food supplies for millions of 
non-combatants are so reduced that the rising 
generation in several countries is impaired 
on a scale never approached in any previous 
war. 

In any country which becomes the seat of 
war an immense destruction of fixed capital is 
wrought ; and at the same time the quick capi- 
tal of all the combatants, accumulated during 
generations, is thrown into the furnace of war 
and consumed unproductively. 

In consequence of the enormous size of the 
national armies and the withdrawal of the able- 
bodied men from productive industries, the in- 
dustries and commerce of the whole world are 
seriously interrupted, whence widespread, in- 
calculable losses to mankind. 

These few months of war have emphasized 
the interdependence of nations the world over 



208 THE BOAB TOWARD PEACE 

with a stress never before equalled. Neutral 
nations far removed from Europe have felt 
keenly the effects of the war on the industries 
and trades by which they live. Men see in this 
instance that whatever reduces the buying and 
consuming capacity of one nation will probably 
reduce also the producing and selling capacity 
of other nations ; and that the gains of com- 
merce and trade are normally mutual, and not 
one-sided. 

All the contending nations have issued huge 
loans which will impose heavy burdens on fu- 
ture generations ; and the yield of the first loans 
has already been spent or pledged. The first 
loan issued by the British Government was 
nearly twice the national debt of the United 
States ; and it is supposed that its proceeds will 
be all spent before next summer. Germany has 
already spent $1,600,000,000 since the war 
broke out — all unproductively and most of it 
for destruction. She is now issuing her second 
great loan. In short, the waste and ruin have 
been without precedent, the destruction of 
wealth has been enormous, and the resulting 
dislocations of finance, industries, and com- 
merce will long afflict the coming generations 
in all the belligerent nations. 



LESSONS OF THE WAR TO MARCH NINTH 209 

All the belligerent nations have already dem- 
onstrated that neither urban life, nor the factory 
system, nor yet corroding luxury has caused in 
them any physical or moral deterioration which 
interferes with their fighting capacity. The 
soldiers of these civilized peoples are just as 
ready for hand-to-hand encounters with cold 
steel as any barbarians or savages have ever been. 
The primitive combative instincts remain in full 
force and can be brought into play by all the 
belligerents with facility. The progress of the 
war should have removed any delusions on this 
subject which Germany, Austria-Hungary, or 
any one of the Allies may have entertained. 
The Belgians, a well-to-do town people, and the 
Serbians, a poor rural population, best illustrate 
this continuity of the martial qualities ; for the 
Belgians faced overwhelming odds, and the 
Serbians have twice driven back large Austrian 
forces, although they have a transport by oxen 
only, an elementary commissariat, no medical or 
surgical supplies to speak of, and scanty mu- 
nitions of war. On the other hand, the principal 
combatants have proved that with money enough 
they can all use effectively the new methods of 
war administration and the new implements for 
destruction. These facts suggest that the war 



210 THE BOAD TOWABD PEACE 

might be much prolonged without yielding any 
results more decisive than those it has already 
yielded ; indeed, that its most probable outcome 
is a stalemate — unless new combatants enter 
the field. 

Fear of Russian invasion seemed at first to 
prompt Germany to war ; but now Germany has 
amply demonstrated that she has no reason to 
look with any keen apprehension on possible 
Bussian aggression upon her territory, and that 
her military organization is adequate for defense 
against any attack from any quarter. The mili- 
tary experience of the last seven months proves 
that the defense, by the temporary intrenchment 
method, has a great advantage over the attack ; 
so that in future wars the aggressor will always 
be liable to find himself at a serious disad- 
vantage, even if his victim is imperfectly pre- 
pared. 

These same pregnant months have also proved 
that armies can be assembled and put into the 
field in effective condition in a much shorter 
time than has heretofore been supposed to be 
possible ; provided there be plenty of money to 
meet the cost of equipment, transportation, and 
supplies. Hence, the advantages of maintaining 
huge active armies, ready for instant attack or 



LESSONS OF THE WAB TO MARCH NINTH 211 

defense, will hereafter be less considerable than 
they have been supposed to be — if the decla- 
ration of war by surprise, as in August last, can 
hereafter be prevented. These considerations, 
taken in connection with the probable inefficacy 
against modern artillery of elaborate fortifica- 
tions, suggest the possibility of a reduction 
throughout Europe of the peace-footing armies. 
It is conceivable that the Swiss militia system 
should satisfy the future needs of most of the 
European States. 

Another important result has been achieved 
in these seven months of colossal war. It has 
been demonstrated that no single nation in any 
part of the world can dominate the other nations, 
or, indeed, any other nation, unless the other 
principal powers consent to that domination ; 
and, in the present state of the world, it is quite 
clear that no such domination will be consented 
to. As soon as this proposition is accepted by 
all the combatants, this war, and perhaps all war 
between civilized nations, will cease. It is ob- 
vious that in the interest of mankind the war 
ought not to cease until Germany is convinced 
that her ambition for empire in Europe and the 
world cannot be gratified. Deutschland ueber 
alles can survive as a shout of patriotic enthu- 



212 TEE ROAD TOWARD PEACE 

siasm, or as an expression of an ardent desire for 
German unity ; but as a maxim of international 
policy it is dead already, and should be buried 
out of the sight and memory of men. 

It has, moreover, become plain that the prog- 
ress in civilization of the white race is to de- 
pend not on the supreme power of any one 
nation, forcing its peculiar civilization on other 
nations, but on the peaceful development of 
many different nationalities, each making con- 
tributions of its own to the progress of the 
whole, and each developing a social, industrial, 
and governmental order of its own, suited to 
its territory, traditions, resources, and natural 
capacities. 

The chronic irritations in Europe, which con- 
tributed to the outbreak of the war, and the 
war itself have emphasized the value and the 
toughness of natural national units, both large 
and small, and the inexpediency of artificially 
dividing such units, or of forcing natural units 
into unnatural associations. These principles 
are now firmly established in the pubHc opin- 
ion of Europe and America. No matter how 
much longer the present war may last, no set- 
tlement will afford any prospect of lasting peace 
in Europe which does not take just account of 



LESSONS OF THE WAR TO MARCH NINTH 213 

these principles. Already the war has demon- 
strated that just consideration of national feel- 
ings, racial kinship, and common commercial 
interests would lead to three fresh groupings 
in Europe : one of the Scandinavian countries, 
one of the three sections into which Poland has 
been divided, and one of the Balkan States 
which have a strong sense of Slavic kinship. 
In the case of Scandinavia and the Balkan 
States the bond might be nothing more than a 
common tariff with common ports and harbor 
regulations ; but Poland needs to be recon- 
structed as a separate kingdom. Thoroughly 
to remove political sores which have been run- 
ning for more than forty years, the people of 
Schleswig-Holstein and Alsace-Lorraine should 
also be allowed to determine by free vote their 
national allegiance. Whether the war ends in 
victory for the Allies, or in a draw or deadlock 
with neither party victorious and neither hu- 
miliated, these new national adjustments will 
be necessary to permanent peace in Europe. 
All the wars in Europe since 1864 unite in dem- 
onstrating that necessity. 

Again, the war has already demonstrated 
that colonies or colonial possessions in remote 
parts of the world are not a source of strength 



214 THE ROAD TOWARD PEACE 

to a European nation when at war, unless that 
nation is strong on the seas. Affiliated com- 
monwealths may be a support to the mother 
country, but colonies held by force in exclusive 
possession are not. Great Britain learned much 
in 1775 about the management of colonies, and 
again she learned in India that the policy of 
exploitation, long pursued by the East India 
Company, had become undesirable from every 
point of view. As the strongest naval power in 
the world. Great Britain has given an admira- 
ble example of the right use of power in mak- 
ing the seas and harbors of the world free to 
the mercantile marine of all the nations with 
which she competes. Her free-trade policy 
helped her to wise action on the subject of 
commercial extension. Nevertheless, the other 
commercial nations, watching the tremendous 
power in war which Great Britain possesses 
through her wide, though not complete, con- 
trol of the oceans, will rejoice when British 
control, though limited and wisely used, is re- 
placed by an unlimited international control. 
This is one of the most valuable lessons of the 
great war. 

Another conviction is strongly impressed 
upon the commercial nations of the world by 



LESSONS OF THE WAB TO MARCH NINTH 215 

the developments of seven months of extensive 
fighting by land and sea, namely, the impor- 
tance of making free to all nations the Kiel 
Canal and the passage from the Black Sea to 
the JEgean. So long as one nation holds the 
Dardanelles and the Bosporus, and another na- 
tion holds the short route from the Baltic to 
the North Sea, there will be dangerous restric- 
tions on the commerce of the world — danger- 
ous in the sense of provoking to war, or of 
causing sores which develop into malignant dis- 
ease. Those two channels should be used for 
the common benefit of mankind, just as the 
Panama Canal or the Suez Canal is intended to 
be. Free seas, free interocean canals and straits, 
the "open door," and free competition in 
international trade are needed securities for 
peace. 

These lessons of the war are as plain now 
as they will be after six months' or six years* 
more fighting. Can the belligerent nations — 
and particularly Germany — take them to heart 
now, or must more millions of men be slaugh- 
tered and more billions of human savings be 
consumed before these teachings of seven fear- 
ful months can get accepted? 

For a great attainable object such , dreadful 



216 THE BOAD TOWABD PEACE 

losses and sufferings as continuation of the war 
entails might, perhaps, be borne ; but the last 
seven months have proved that the objects with 
which Austria-Hungary and Germany went to 
war are unattainable in the present state of 
Europe. Austria-Hungary, even with the active 
aid of Germany and Turkey, cannot prevail in 
Serbia against the active or passive resistance 
of Serbia, Russia, Rumania, Greece, Italy, 
France, and Great Britain. Germany cannot 
crush France supported by Great Britain and 
Russia, or keep Belgium, except as a subject 
and hostile province, and in defiance of the 
public opinion of the civilized world. In seven 
months Great Britain and France have made 
up for their lack of preparedness, and have 
brought the military operations of Germany in 
France to a standstill. On the other hand, 
Great Britain and France must already realize 
that they cannot drive the German armies out 
of France and Belgium without a sacrifice of 
blood and treasure from which the stoutest 
hearts may well shrink. 

Has not the war already demonstrated that 
jealous and hostile coalitions armed to the teeth 
will surely bring on Europe not peace and ad- 
vancing civilization, but savage war and an ar- 



LESSONS OF THE WAR TO MABCH NINTH 217 

rest of civilization ? Has it not already proved 
that Europe needs one comprehensive union or 
federation competent to procure and keep for 
Europe peace through justice ? There is no al- 
ternative except more war. 



THE END 



APPENDIX 



APPENDIX 



PRESIDENT ELIOT'S ADDRESS AT THE SPECIAL 
ACADEMIC SESSION CALLED TO CONFER THE 
DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF LAWS ON PRINCE 
HENRY OF PRUSSIA, MARCH 6, 19021 

After a short greeting, the Prince was escorted 
into Sanders Theatre. At his entrance the audience 
rose and remained standing until he had taken his 
seat on the platform at the right of President Eliot. 
On the platform were seated the Governing Boards, 
the members of the Faculties, the invited guests, and 
the Prince's suite. President Eliot, sitting in the an- 
cient President's chair, read the following address, 
at the close of which he conferred upon the Prince 
the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws : — 

" This occasion is unique. Twice in the history of 
the University has a special academic session been 
held to do honor to the President of the United 
States, making a progress through the country ; but 
never before has this democratic University been 
called together on purpose to do honor to a foreign 
prince. Weighty reasons must have determined such 
unprecedented action on the part of this Society of 
Scholars. 

1 From the Harvard Graduates^ Magazine, June, 1902. 



222 APPENDIX 

" These are the reasons : — 

*' Our students of history know the Teutonic 
sources, in the dim past, of many institutions and 
public customs which have been transmitted through 
England to this New England. 

" The Puritan origin of the University makes us 
hold in grateful remembrance the heroes of Protes- 
tantism — Luther, Melancthon, Erasmus, and their 
kindred spirits — and the German princes who up- 
held that precious cause through long years of con- 
fused alarms and cruel warfare. The Puritan gov- 
ernment of Massachusetts followed anxiously the 
vicissitudes of the Thirty Years' War, and was in 
the habit of ordering Public Thanksgiving to God 
for ' good news from Germany.' 

" In watching the social and ethnological phenom- 
ena of our own times we have seen that the largest 
contribution which a European people made in the 
nineteenth century to the population of the United 
States came from Germany, and that the German 
quota was not only the most numerous but the best 
educated. 

"As University men we feel the immense weight 
of obligation under which America rests to the tech- 
nical schools and universities of the German Father- 
land. From them thousands of eager American stu- 
dents have drawn instruction and inspiration, and 
taken example. At this moment hundreds of Amer- 
ican teachers who call some German university their 
foster-mother are at work in schools, colleges^, and 



APPENDIX 223 

universities all the way from this icy seacoast to the 
hot Philippines. 

" Our men of letters and science know well the 
unparalleled contributions Germany has made since 
the middle of the nineteenth century to pure knowl- 
edge, and also to science applied in the new arts 
and industries which within fifty years have so 
marvellously changed the relations of man to 
nature. 

" Our whole people have the profoundest sympa- 
thy with the unification of Germany. We all believe 
in a great union of federated states, bound together 
by a common language, by unrestricted mutual trade, 
by common currency, mails, means of communica- 
tion, courts of justice, and institutions of credit and 
finance, and inspired by a passionate patriotism. 
Such is the venerable American Union ; such the 
young German Empire. 

" We gladly welcome here to-day a worthy repre- 
sentative of German greatness, worthy in station, 
profession, and character. We see in him, however, 
something more than the representative of a superb 
nationality and an imperial ruler. Universities have 
long memories. Forty years ago the American Union 
was in deadly peril, and thousands of its young men 
were bleeding and dying for it. It is credibly re- 
ported that at a very critical moment the Queen of 
England said to her Prime Minister : ' My Lord, 
you must understand that I shall sign no paper 
which means war with the United States.' The 



224 APPENDIX 

grandson of that illustrious woman is sitting with 
us here." 

Here President Eliot rose, bowed to the President 
and Fellows, and to the Board of Overseers, and re- 
mained standing. 

Prince Henry rose when his name was pronounced. 

" Now, therefore, in exercise of authority given 
me by the President and Fellows and the Board 
of Overseers, and in the favoring presence of the 
friends here assembled, I create honorary Doctor 
of Laws Albert William Henry, Prince of Prussia, 
and ' Admiral, and in the name of this Society 
of Scholars, I declare that he is entitled to the 
rights and privileges pertaining to this degree, and 
that his name is to be forever borne on its roll of 
honorary members." 



II 

PRESIDENT ELIOT'S ADDRESS AT A BANQUET 
GIVEN MARCH 6, 1902, BY THE CITY OF BOS- 
TON TO PRINCE HENRY OF PRUSSIA 

Mb. Mayor, Your Royal Highness, Your Ex- 



cellency 



1 



The nation's guests — Boston's this evening — 
have just had some momentary glimpses of the ex- 
temporized American cities, of the prairies and the 
AUeghanies, of some great rivers and lakes, and of 
prodigious Niagara ; and so they have perhaps some 
vision of the large scale of our country, although 
they have run over not more than one thirtieth of 
its area. But now they have come to little Massa- 
chusetts, lying on the extreme eastern seacoast — by 
comparison a minute commonwealth, with a rough 
climate and a poor soil. It has no grand scenery to 
exhibit, no stately castles, churches, or palaces come 
down through centuries, such as Europe offers, and 
for at least two generations it has been quite unable 
to compete with the fertile fields of the West in pro- 
ducing its own food supplies. What has Massachu- 
setts to show them, or any intelligent European 
visitors? Only the fruitage — social, industrial, and 

* The Governor. 



226 APPENDIX 

governmental — of the oldest and most prosperous 
democracy in the world. 

For two hundred and eighty years this little Com- 
monwealth has been developing in freedom, with no 
class legislation, feudal system, dominant church, or 
standing army to hinder or restrain it. The period 
of development has been long enough to show what 
the issues of democracy are likely to be; and it 
must be interesting for cultivated men brought up 
under another regime to observe that human nature 
turns out to be much the same thing under a demo- 
cratic form of government as under the earlier forms, 
and that the fundamental motives and objects of 
mankind remain almost unchanged amid external 
conditions somewhat novel. Democracy has not dis- 
covered or created a new human nature ; it has only 
modified a little the familiar article. The domestic 
affections, and loyalty to tribe, clan, race, or nation 
still rule mankind. The family motive remains su- 
preme. 

It is an accepted fact that the character of each 
civilized nationality is well exhibited in its univer- 
sities. Now Harvard University has been largely 
governed for two hundred and fifty years by a body 
of seven men called the Corporation. Every member 
of that Corporation which received your royal high- 
ness this afternoon at Cambridge is descended from 
a family stock which has been serviceable in Massa- 
chusetts for at least seven generations. More than 
one hundred years ago Washington was asked to 



APPENDIX 227 

describe all the high officers in the American army 
of that day who might be thought of for the chief 
command. He gave his highest praise to Major- 
General Lincoln of Massachusetts, saying of him 
that he was "sensible, brave, and honest." There 
are Massachusetts Lincolns to-day to whom these 
words exactly apply. 

The democracy preserves and uses sound old fami- 
lies ; it also utilizes strong blood from foreign sources. 
Thus, in the second governing board of Harvard Uni- 
versity, — the Overseers, — a French Bonaparte, a 
member of the Roman Catholic Church, sits beside 
a Scotch farmer's son, Presbyterian by birth and 
education, now become the leader in every sense of 
the most famous Puritan church in Boston. The 
democracy also promotes human beings of remark- 
able natural gifts who appear as sudden outbursts 
of personal power, without prediction or announce- 
ment through family merit. It is the social mobility 
of a democracy which enables it to give immediate 
place to personal merit, whether inherited or not, 
and also silently to drop unserviceable descendants 
of earlier meritorious generations. 

Democracy, then, is only a further unfolding of 
the multitudinous human nature, which is essentially 
stable. It does not mean the abolition of leadership, 
or an averaged population, or a dead-level of society. 
Like monarchical and aristocratic forms of govern- 
ment, it means a potent influence for those who 
prove capable of exerting it, and a highly diversified 



228 APPENDIX 

society on many shifting levels, determined in lib- 
erty, and perpetually exchanging members up and 
down. It means sensuous luxury for those who want 
it, and can afford to pay for it ; and for the wise rich 
it provides the fine luxury of promoting public ob- 
jects by well-considered giving. 

Since all the world seems tending toward this 
somewhat formidable democracy, it is encouraging 
to see what the result of two hundred and eighty 
years of democratic experience has been in this 
peaceful and prosperous Massachusetts. Democracy 
has proved here to be a safe social order — safe for 
the property of individuals, safe for the finer arts of 
living, safe for diffused public happiness and well- 
being. 

We remember gratefully in this presence that a 
strong root of Massachusetts liberty and prosperity 
was the German Protestantism of four centuries ago, 
and that another and fresher root of well-being for 
every manufacturing people, like the people of Mas- 
sachusetts, has been German applied science during 
the past fifty years. We hope, as Your Royal High- 
ness goes homeward-bound across the restless Atlan- 
tic, — type of the rough " sea of storm-engendering 
liberty," — you may cherish a cheerful remembrance 
of barren but rich, strenuous but peaceful, free but 
self-controlled, Massachusetts. 



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U . S . A 



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